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Playnotes, unless otherwise credited, are written and/or compiled by Celise Kalke, Resident Dramaturg. She may be contacted at ckalke@uchicago.edu.

Synopsis
Chronology of James Joyce's Life
James Joyce on Dubliners and "The Dead"
Critical Views of James Joyce's "The Dead"
Chronology of Irish History (to 1922)
Excerpts from Irish History
Glossary
Other Resources

SYNOPSIS

The setting: Wednesday, January 6, 1904, Dublin, Ireland

Gabriel Conroy, a University Professor in the prime of life, introduces the Misses Morkans’ annual party. Gabriel describes a Christmas party, though technically it falls on the Feast of the Epiphany or Twelfth Night--the traditional Christian celebration of the three wise men presenting their gifts to the baby Jesus. This story is one of enormous significance to the narrator, who is both inside and outside of the action.

The hostesses of this annual gathering are Gabriel's Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia, and his cousin Mary Jane. Aunt Julia sang professionally in one of Dublin's church choirs, while Aunt Kate and now Mary Jane support themselves by giving music lessons. The other party guests are: Mary Jane's students Rita and Michael; a music presenter, Mr. Browne; a famous tenor, Bartell D'Arcy; a colleague of Gabriel's from the University, Molly Ivors; and an old family friend, Mrs. Malins.

Gabriel describes the singing and dancing and celebration of Dublin's musical life. Then he stops to share a philosophical moment about life and death and the illusion of certainty. Something at this party seems to have changed Gabriel significantly. After telling the audience that he came late, Gabriel joins the scene as one of the guests--the honored favorite nephew. With him is his wife Gretta, who jokes with the aunts about Gabriel’s over-protectiveness, including his insistence that Gretta wear galoshes. Gabriel and Gretta explain that to avoid a late and chilly ride home, they’ve booked a room in a up-scale hotel for the night. The aunts worry about Mrs. Malin's son Freddy, who is late and therefore probably quite drunk (and who that afternoon broke a New Year’s pledge to give up drinking).

The party gets properly underway with traditional Irish folk songs, getting increasingly Irish and folkish over the course of the evening. Freddy Malins arrives, drunk as his mother feared. Miss Ivors provokes Gabriel into a discussion of Irish Nationalism by identifying him as the author of book reviews in a conservative English-sympathizing newspaper, the Daily Express. Gabriel finds the whole conversation distasteful, especially when his genuine frustration with the political situation in Ireland is revealed.

The political argument inspires singing a song, "Parnell’s Plight" inspired by Charles Stuart Parnell. Parnell was a member of Parliament for Ireland, and although a Protestant in a mostly Catholic country represented the hope for a negotiated home rule for Ireland with England. Late in his career, Parnell was named as "correspondent" in a divorce case (meaning the husband accused Parnell of having an affair with his wife), and the scandal ruined his political career.

Parnell became a symbol for home rule in Ireland, but also a symbol of the Irish Man betrayed. When Molly Ivors takes over the song, and Gabriel challenges her with words of his own, the room must take sides in terms of how they express their Nationalism. But in the end, Molly and Gabriel agree on owing duty to Ireland.

Gretta becomes fascinated with Michael, one of Mary Jane’s young students. She volunteers to sing a song on her own. “Goldenhair” is a sensual song of love and courtship from the West of Ireland, where Gretta lived as a girl. Gabriel surprises himself by becoming attracted to his wife in the manner of their youth, and begins to look longingly to the hotel room at the evening’s end. Gabriel then looks back on this past enthusiasm with ironic amusement.

The party continues with a lively dinner, filled with excellent food and music-world gossip. Gabriel stands up to make his speech, but Aunt Julia drops a glass interrupting him. She feels faint, and briefly leaves the table. Freddy and Mrs. Malins tell the remaining guests that Freddy will soon leave for a monastery with strict rules of abstinence.

Aunt Julia returns, and Gabriel praises the hostesses with renewed vigor, toasting them as the Three Graces of Dublin’s musical world. Aunt Julia then volunteers to perform a song, "Naughty Girl," and surprises the company with a slightly scandalous number from an operetta. Dancing erupts, only to be interrupted by Aunt Julia’s frailty and the irate tapping of the landlord, Mr. Fulham, on the floor below. Freddy Malins, not one to be easily intimidated, leads the company in a riotous song and dance, "Wake the Dead". The party refuses to be shut down!

Afterwards, Mary Jane plays her Academy Piece exhibiting her technical prowess. Aunt Julia retires to her bedroom. Most of the company come up to say goodbye. The professional tenor, Mr. D’Arcy, sneaks into Aunt Julia’s room and tenderly sings an Italian aria full of the pathos of unrequited love. Freddy and Michael invade Aunt Julia’s room, and all the men sing her to sleep.

Cabs are caught. Future plans are made. Aunt Julia, alone, dreams of her youth as a talented young singer. Near death, she enjoys singing with the memory of her own musical prowess.

Back in their hotel room, Gabriel eagerly awaits the night feeling like a young man on the first night of a honeymoon. Gretta however fails to share Gabriel’s mood. Instead she shares a story of love and loss, a secret from her youth. Gabriel’s confidence shatters. "What more lies hidden from him,” he wonders. As Gretta cries herself to sleep, Gabriel stares out at the winter snow. He feels utterly alone, and then suddenly at one with the snow, the living and the dead.

CHRONOLOGY OF JAMES JOYCE'S LIFE
February 2, 1882 Joyce born, the oldest of ten children to survive infancy
1888 Joyce sent to a Jesuit boarding school, the Eton of Ireland
1891 Parnell’s death. Because of financial difficulty Joyce does not return to any school until 1893.
1898 – 1902 Joyce attends University College, Dublin
1900 Joyce publishes a play review (Ibsen) in a London Review
1902 Joyce first lives in Paris
1903 Joyce returns to Ireland to visit his dying mother; Nora Barnacle’s (the future Mrs. Joyce) first love Sonny Bodkin contracts tuberculosis and dies (paralleling the events of “The Dead”)
1904 Joyce begins writing the stories that will become Dubliners
June 16, 1904 First date with Nora Barnacle, the love of Joyce’s life.
October, 1904 Joyce and Nora Barnacle (unmarried) leave Ireland together
July 27, 1905 Joyce’s son Giorgio (George) born.
1906 – 1907 While working at a Bank in Rome (and despising Italy) Joyce begins thinking about “The Dead”
June 6, 1907 Joyce’s daughter Lucia is born, a schizophrenic.
1909 A friend tells Joyce Nora was cheating on him in 1904. This was untrue, but remained a deeply scarring event in Joyce’s life.
1914 Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man published in serial form; Dubliners published.
1915 Joyce moves his family to Zurich, Switzerland
1916 Portrait published as a book by Joyce’s patroness Harriet Weaver.
1920 Ulysses is banned in the United States after episodes were published. Joyce movies with his family to Paris.
1922 Ulysses published in Paris by Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Co.
1931 At their daughter’s insistence, Joyce and Nora Barnacle marry.
1939 Finnegans Wake published.
1940 Joyce moves from Paris to Zurich, and dies there.

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JAMES JOYCE ON DUBLINERS AND "THE DEAD"

In the second draft of A Portrait of the Artist, called Stephen Hero, [Joyce] presented the theory in this way:
"...a trivial incident. . . an epiphany [is] a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. [Stephen] believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments."
-"Ephiphanies and Epiclete", Viking Critical Library Dubliners

On drinking and Epiphany:
What moves upon me from the darkness subtle and murmurous as a flood, passionate and fierce with an indecent movement of the loins? What leaps, crying in answer, out of me, as an eagle to eagle in mid air, crying to overcome, crying for an iniquitous abandonment?

[Joyce] was doubtful whether his own stories would ever find a publisher, and remained doubtful for nine years more. I cannot write without offending people,” he decided. Yet it was the naturalism of the stories to which he clung as their special talent. Before sending them to [a publisher] for consideration. . . . he conscientiously had all their details verified. Stanislaus (Joyce’s brother) was required to make sure that a priest can be buried in a habit, like Father Flynn in “The Sisters”; that Aungier and Wicklow Streets are in the Royal Exchange Ward, and that a municipal election can take place in October (for “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”); that the police at Sydney Parade are of the D. division, that the city ambulance would be called out to Sydney Parade for an accident, that a person injured there would be taken for treatment to Vincent’s hospital (for “A Painful Case”); and that the police (for “after the Race”) are supplied with provision by government rather than private contract. He had written the books, he informed Grant Richards, “With the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard.” There was no point in suggesting to the publisher his fear that the stories might be caricatures.

He emphasized to [the publisher] also that the book was written, “for the most part, in a style of scrupulous meanness,” and spoke of “the special odor of corruption which, I hope, floats over my stories.” These qualities are present in Dubliners, but they do little to describe the pathos which is involved, even when not dominant, in all the stories, or the humor which is in most of them. The writer’s mature attitude is that of the boy in “Araby,” a mixture of “anguish and anger,” mitigated by his obvious please in Dublin talk. Like Mr. Duffy in “A Painful Case,” the Dubliners are “outcast from life’s feast”; with a pity which he rarely condescends to make explicit, Joyce portrays their famine.
-Richard Ellman, Joyce Biographer

Sometimes thinking of Ireland it seems to me that I have been unnecessarily harsh. I have reproduced [in the stories of Dubliners prior to “The Dead”] none of the attraction of the city for I have never felt at my ease in any city since I left it, except in Paris. I have not reproduced its ingenuous insularity and its hospitality. The latter “virtue” so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe. I have not been just to its beauty: for it is more beautiful naturally in my opinion than what I have seen of England, Switzerland, France, Austria or Italy.
-James Joyce, Sep. 25 1907

No man, I believe, can ever be worth a woman’s love.
-James Joyce, 1909

Adorn your body for me, dearest. Be beautiful and happy and loving and provoking, full of memories, full of cravings, when we meet. Do you remember the three adjectives I have used in “The Dead “in speaking of your body. They are these: “musical and strange and perfumed.” My jealousy is still mouldering in my heart. Your love for me must be fierce and violent to make me forget utterly.
-James Joyce in a letter to Nora Barnacle, 1909

She Weeps over Rahoon
Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling,
Where my dark lover lies.
Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling,
At grey moonrise.

Love, her thou
How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling,
Ever unanswered and the dark rain falling,
Then as now.

Dark too our hearts, O love, shall lie and cold
As his sad heart has lain
Under the moongrey neetles, the black mould
And muttering rain.
-James Joyce

My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the center of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dare to alter in the presentiment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard.
-James Joyce in a letter to Grant Richards about Dubliners

Do you see that man who has just skipped out of the way of the tram? Consider, if he had been run over, how significant every act of his would at once become. I don’t mean for the police inspector. I mean for anybody who knew him. And his thoughts, for anybody that could know them. It is my idea of the significance of trivial things that I want to give the two or three unfortunate wretches who may eventually read me.
-James Joyce in a letter to his brother, Stanislaus

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CRITICAL VIEWS OF JAMES JOYCE'S "THE DEAD"

The history of literary criticism devoted to the stories in Dubliners has in fact stressed their revelatory nature: the revelations they provide a reader, and the revelations they record, throughout, for characters. Inevitably, those illuminations have been seen in terms of Joyce’s own concept of “epiphany”; probably no other motif has so pervaded critical discussion of both the volume as a whole and its individual stories.

Epiphany may be defined as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether from some object, scene, event, or memorable phase of the mind, the manifestation being out of proportion to the significance or strictly logical relevance of whatever produces it.
-Morris Beja: "One Good Look at Themselves: Epiphanies in Dubliners”

“The Dead” . . . does share the sense of bondage and of the desirability of escape [with the other Dubliners’ stories]: Gabriel, like Gretta explicitly and others in the volume implicitly, hears the call of “distant music.”
-Morris Beja: "One Good Look at Themselves: Epiphanies in Dubliners”

At the end of “The Dead,” Gabriel achieves epiphany; other characters in Dubliners’ stories come to similar revelations as well. . . . We cannot know more than Gabriel does about Gretta’s past life and about her feelings for Michael Furey, for we hear from her only what he does. But if we share his ignorance and uncertainty, a compensation may be that we can also share his insight: if Gabriel achieves epiphany, we may too.
-Morris Beja: "One Good Look at Themselves: Epiphanies in Dubliners”

Even when we tend to accept a character’s new awareness of his or her situation, we cannot be sure that we and the character are correct, or that the new awareness is any less fleeting than the sensation of epiphany itself.
-Morris Beja: "One Good Look at Themselves: Epiphanies in Dubliners”

Most readers in the real world will almost inevitably want to know (whether they can or not) how legitimate it is to share in . . . Gabriel’s self-contempt in the hotel in “The Dead.” We cannot know, finally; but it is striking and worth noting how cogent the epiphanies seem to be at the close of several of the stories, even as they entail illuminations about the entire lives of certain characters.
-Morris Beja: "One Good Look at Themselves: Epiphanies in Dubliners”

All of our questions about the reliability of characters’ epiphanies arise with special insistence in regard to Gabriel’s in “The Dead.” Some of the answers intruding themselves upon his consciousness are to questions Gabriel has never dared ask before, or thought to ask. Their cumulative effect seems to him cosmically significant; we may wonder whether they are as world-shaking as he makes them out to be, but for him they seem so—and, consequently, so they are, for him. Fittingly, they all occur on [or near] Twelfth Night, the Feast of Epiphany.

The choice of date is no doubt in part ironic, and as is frequently the case in Joyce’s presentation of epiphanies, there is much irony in Gabriel’s final revelations. Some of the irony appears, in retrospect, in the preparations for the epiphanies—as when we recall Gabriel’s reference to Aunt Julia’s singing as “a surprise and a revelation to us all to-night” and realize that is has been Bartell D’arcy’s singing of “The Lass of Aughrim” that has in fact yielded “a surprise and a revelation.”
-Morris Beja: "One Good Look at Themselves: Epiphanies in Dubliners”

Similarly, although there has long been a controversy about the nature and full reliability of Gabriel’s epiphanies at the end of “The Dead,” we may takes as a sign of growth, maturation, and a new perception about himself and others, his realization of his identity with the “boy in the gasworks.”

Gabriel Conroy and several characters within the volume, then, have had in the end that “one good look at themselves.” So have “the Irish people.” And so, for that matter, have untold numbers, throughout the world, of Joyce’s readers.
-Morris Beja: "One Good Look at Themselves: Epiphanies in Dubliners”

Gabriel’s conviction of failure is heightened by his encounters with Lily and Miss Ivors. Like the Circe of the Divine Comedy, Miss Ivors opposes the blessed transhumanizing power of Gretta (Beatrice) with her evil transmutations. She calls him “Innocent Amy” refusing to stay for supper, she bids all a farewell in Gaelic and goes laughing “down the staircase” home, saying “I’m quite able to take care of myself.” Gabriel stares “blankly” after her, not understanding her actions. Does she recall the mocking denial of Christ and the banishment of Dante by his fellow countrymen?
-Joyce and the Bible, Virginia Moseley

[The snow] is especially meaningful because it indicates that Gabriel, like Dante, has become so transhumanized he is able to hear the music of the spheres. Its falling on both the “living” and the “dead” suggests a comprehensive union of opposites. The phraseology is from the catechism’s description of the Mass, “a sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ which are really present under the appearances of bread and wine; and are offered to God, by the priest, for the living and the dead.”
-Joyce and the Bible, Virginia Moseley

Literally, the word “epiphany” refers to a showing forth, a revelation. In Greek drama it can refer to the climactic moment when a god appears and imposes order on the scene before him. In the Christian religious tradition the Feast of the Epiphany celebrates the revelations of Christ’s divinity to the Magi. Joyce used the term in a special but related way. In the second draft of A Portrait of the Artist, called Stephen Hero, [Joyce] presented the theory in this way:

. . . a trivial incident. . . an epiphany [is] a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. [Stephen] believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.”
-"Ephiphanies and Epiclete”, Viking Critical Library Dubliners

“Epiphany” thus comes to mean a moment of revelation or insight such as usually climaxes a Dubliners story. Some characters merely reveal themselves or give themselves away; others achieve insight into their situations.
Ephiphanies and Epiclete”, Viking Critical Library Dubliners

So far as we know, Joyce himself did not apply the word “epiphany” to Dubliners, nor did he use any of the recorded epiphanies in these stories. He did, however, try in them to expose [social] paralysis. . . He called [these moments] “epicleti.”

This word may refer to an invocation to the Holy Ghost (epiklesis) still used in the Eastern Chruch but not in Roman Catholic ritual. In this epiklesis, the Holy Ghost is besought to transform the consecrated wafer of bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ. As Joyce explained to his brother Stanislaus, “there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the mass and what I am trying to do. . . to give people a kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own. . . for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.”
Ephiphanies and Epiclete”, Viking Critical Library Dubliners

The word “epicleti” has another related meaning in Greek, which Joyce may have considered. An epiklesis can also refer to a reproach or an imputation. And epikletos can mean “summoned before a court,” or “accused.” Thus the epicleti may be considered the accused, summoned up by Joyce to stand trial as specimens of Irish paralysis. The two great priestly powers of transubstantiation and judgment of the sinful were both relished by Joyce in bringing these Dubliners before us in their flesh of words.
Ephiphanies and Epiclete”, Viking Critical Library Dubliners

Why did [Joyce] not write another story after “The Dead”? Is it because he felt that he was not a storyteller or that he believed that he had already done all that could be done with the form? It is as difficult to think of a real storyteller, like Chekhov, who had experienced the thrill of the completed masterpiece, giving up short stories forever as it is to think of Keats giving up lyric poetry. This is a question to which Dubliners would suggest an answer, and I am assuming that it does so.

In “The Dead” James Joyce brings to the highest pitch of perfection in English the naturalism of Flaubert.
-Allen Tate

If the art of naturalism consists mainly in making active those elements which had hitherto in fiction remained inert, that is, description and expository summary, the further push given the method by Joyce consists in manipulating what at first sight seems to be mere physical detail into dramatic symbolism. As Gabriel Conroy, the “hero” of “The Dead,” enters the house of his aunts, he flicks snow from his galoshes with his scarf; by the time the story ends the snow has filled all the visible earth, and stands as the symbol of the revelation of Gabriel’s inner life.
-Allan Tate

[The end of the story] is the sudden revaluation to Gabriel of his egoistic relation to his wife, and, through that revelation, of his inadequate response to his entire experience. Thus Joyce must establish his central intelligence through Gabriel’s eyes, but a little above and outside him at the same time, so that we shall know him at a given moment only through what he sees and feels in terms of that moment.
-Allan Tate

. . . from the beginning to the end of the story we are never told anything; we are shown everything. We are not told, for example, that the milieu of the story is the provincial, middle-class, “cultivated” society of Dublin at the turn of the century; we are not told that Gabriel represents its emotional sterility (as contrasted with the “peasant” richness of his wife Gretta), its complacency, its devotion to genteel culture, its sentimental evasion of “reality.” All this we see dramatized; it is all mad active. Nothing is given us from the externally omniscient point of view.
-Allan Tate

To accumulate a large, turbulent scene only to focus at the end on the isolated relations of a man and a woman is the technique of [Joyce’s greatest works], “The Dead”, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.
-Richard Ellman

That Joyce at the age of twenty-five and –six should have written this story ought not to seem odd. Young writers reach their greatest eloquence in dwelling upon the horrors of middle age and what follows it. But beyond this proclivity which he shared with others, Joyce had a special reason for writing the story of “The Dead” in 1906 and 1907. In his own mind he had thoroughly justified his flight from Ireland, but he had not decided the question of where he would fly to. In Trieste and Rome he had learned what he had unlearned in Dublin, to be a Dubliner. As he had written his brother from Rome with some astonishment, he felt humiliated when anyone attacked his "impoverished country." "The Dead" is his first song of exile.
-Richard Ellman

On September 6, 1907 he had almost completed “The Dead”; his rheumatic fever probably helped him to see more clearly the ending of the story in at atmosphere of fatigue, of weariness, of swooning.
-Richard Ellman

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CHRONOLOGY OF IRISH HISTORY (UNTIL 1922)

Ireland is ruled by Gaelic and Viking warriors, and partitioned into small kingdoms.

1166
One of the Irish Kings, Dermot Mac Murrough is driven overseas and seeks help from the English King Henry II. In 1171, Henry is the first English King to occupy Irish territory.

1459-60
The Irish Kings side with the Yorks in the Wars of the Roses, which leads to increased English occupation of Ireland under the Yorkist King Edward IV. It also leads to even great Irish occupation once the Tudors (a rival English royal family) take over.

1536
The English King Henry VIII (in between wives 1 and 2 out of 6) breaks with Rome and establishes the Church of England. England (with small exceptions) is now a Protestant country, while Ireland remains Catholic.

1543
King Henry VIII is also declared King of Ireland, although England only controls colonies in Ireland.

1560
The first English protestants settle in Ireland.

1575
Irish Lords seek Catholic support against further English invasion under Queen Elizabeth I.

1593-1602
Unsuccessful Irish rebellion against Protestant English colonizers.

1603
The Tudor (under the English King James I) invasion of Ireland is complete.

1608
The Six Ulster counties (most of contemporary Northern Ireland) are “planted” with English settlers.

1626
The English King Charles I allows Catholicism to once again be practiced in Ireland.

1641-1647
In reaction to the English Civil War and Puritan Revolution, Ireland collapses into political chaos.

1649-1652
The English General Cromwell and his Protestant Army reconquer Ireland and dispossess Irish of their land.

1665
One-third of Ireland is given back to the Irish.

1687
Under the English Catholic King James II, Irish Catholics get more control of Ireland.

1690
After being deposed by the English protestants, James is defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland by his successor William of Orange.

1695-1772
Acts of Parliament taking away the rights of Catholics in Ireland are passed.

1778-1782
A reform leads to the reopening of the Catholic colleges in Ireland.

1798
After an Irish armed rebellion and the defeat of the United Irishmen at the Battle of Vinegar Hill, martial law is imposed.

1849-1851
Irish potato famine. About a million people die in the famine, and more people immigrate and continue to leave throughout the nineteenth century. From 1849 to 1900, the population of Ireland decreased from about 8 million to between 4 and 5 million.

'The Almighty Indeed sent the Potato Blight but the English Created the Famine' -- John Mitchel

1882
James Joyce born.

1877-1891
The Home Rule Confederation led by Charles Stuart Parnell (an Irish protestant who became a member of the English Parliament) leads to hope of a negotiated home rule with the English parliament. These hopes are dashed after Parnell is named as the third party in a divorce case and disgraced. He dies in 1891.

1904
Setting of “The Dead”
James Joyce meets Nora Donagle, and they leave Ireland to live in Europe.

1908
Sinn Féin founded.

1914
James Joyce’s Dubliners in published.

1914-1918
World War I

1916
The Irish Republic is declared. In the WWI Battle of the Somme, the 36th (Irish Ulster Division) lost 5,500 men in the first two days of July.

1919-1921
Anglo-Irish war of Independence.

1921
The Irish Republican Army is founded.

1922
After the Irish Civil War, the Irish Free State is inaugurated, and the six Northeast counties that make up Northern Ireland separate.

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EXCERPTS FROM IRISH HISTORY
When the potato, the staple food of rural Ireland, rotted in the ground through the onset of blight in the mid-1840s, roughly a million people died of starvation and fever in the Great Potato Famine that ensued, and even more fled abroad. Moreover, emigration continued after the famine had ended in 1850. By 1911, Ireland's population was less than half of what it had been before the famine.
-Encyclopædia Britannica

Ireland’s apparent stability was dangerously dependent upon population drainage through emigration. This in turn depended upon the persistence of demand for Irish labor, service, and marriage overseas. By 1870 more than half as many natives of Ireland were living overseas as at home. Three-fifths of the three million emigrants were in the USA, a quarter in Britain, and about one-thirteenth in Australia as in Canada. The unique decline of Ireland’s population for nearly a century after the Famine (1848-1851) was mainly caused by structural emigration which removed up to half of each generation from the country.

Women were roughly as likely as men to emigrate, and in some years stronger foreign demand for female labor combined with declining domestic opportunities to produce a female majority. All classes, religions, and regions were drained by emigration, but the intensity of overseas movement was greatest from the poorer counties of the western seaboard. Short-distance migration in search of urban employment was more characteristic of Leinster and Ulster. Not all migration was irreversible: seasonal movement to Britain was commonplace among north-western adolescent males, while many ‘returned Yanks” and holiday-makers brought back personal tidings of the good life abroad and often invested their savings in Irish farms, pubs, or marriages. Emigration was concentrated among young adults at the threshold of employment and marriage, so tending to create a swollen proportion of old people in Ireland itself. So long as demand for emigrant services endured, Ireland could safely reproduce more children than its households could support. Yet any stoppage of the ‘safety valve’ would soon generate a surplus of frustrated young people competing for survival in Ireland’s congested markets of marriage and employment.

Emigration was the key to Ireland’s unusual and remarkably stable demographic system between 1870-1914. While fertility within marriage declined elsewhere in Europe, the average completed Irish family remained at about six children. Children were “reared for emigration” in the hope that they would not only fund further emigration but also provide social insurance for their parents. In rural areas the acquisition of spouse and farm became almost inseparable. Yet emigration, though heavy, was insufficient to cope with the surplus ‘unmatched” populations. By 1911 over a quarter of 50-year-old women. . . had never married. . . for most of the century after 1870 Ireland maintained a unique combination of infrequent marriage, high marital fertility, and heavy emigration.
-David Fitzpatrick, Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland

A return of bad harvests in 1879 brought new fears of famine, and Michael Davitt founded the Irish Land League, seeking to achieve for tenants security of tenure, fair rents, and freedom to sell property. A formidable agrarian agitation developed when Davitt was joined by Charles Stewart Parnell, a young [Protestant] landowner and member of Parliament in the Home Rule Party, which soon elected him as its leader in place of Butt. Parnell undertook a tour of North America to raise funds for the Land League; there he was influenced by two Irish Americans, John Devoy, a leading member of Clan na Gael, an effective American Fenian organization, and Pat Ford, whose New York paper The Irish World preached militant republicanism and hatred of England. At Westminster Parnell adopted a policy of persistent obstruction, which compelled attention to Irish needs by bringing parliamentary business to a standstill. Gladstone was forced to introduce his Land Act of 1881, conceding fix[ed] tenure, fair rents, and free sale of the tenant's interest.

Parnell's success was not achieved without serious difficulties, including the ultimate proscription of the Land League by the government and the imprisonment of its leaders. As a result, Parnell used his parliamentary party, then increased to 86, to defeat and thus dismiss from office Gladstone's Liberal government, already unpopular in England as a result of its failure to relieve the British forces under Charles George Gordon at Khartoum, Sudan, in 1884. For a while Conservatives and Liberals both negotiated with Parnell, but ultimately Gladstone became converted to Home Rule, introducing a bill to bring it into effect after he returned to office in 1886. The bill, however, was defeated by a combination of Conservative Unionists influenced by Irish Orangemen and splinter groups from the Liberal Party.

There followed 20 years during which Irish Nationalist ambitions seemed frustrated, partly because Conservative-Unionists were mainly in power and partly because bitter internal rivalries discredited the Irish Nationalist Party after Parnell's involvement (1889) in a divorce suit. Meanwhile, Gladstone's second Home Rule Bill (1893) was rejected in the House of Lords. Only in 1900 was a Parnellite, John Redmond, able to reunite the Nationalists. In the last years of the century, partly in reaction to political frustrations, a cultural nationalist movement developed, led by Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill. Through the Gaelic League much was done to revive interest in the speaking and study of Irish. These cultural movements were reinforced by others, such as that of the Sinn Féin (“We Ourselves”) movement led by Arthur Griffith, who preached a doctrine of political self-help. It subsequently emerged that a Fenian organization, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, had revived and was secretly recruiting membership through various cultural societies and through the Gaelic Athletic Association, founded to promote specifically Irish sports.

At the close of the century the Conservatives initiated a policy designed to “kill Home Rule by kindness” by introducing constructive reforms in Ireland. Their most important achievement in this field was the Wyndham Land Purchase Act of 1903. This, by providing generous inducements to landlords to sell their estates, effected by government mediation the transfer of landownership to the occupying tenants.
-Encyclopædia Britannica

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GLOSSARY
Compiled by Rob Cohn, Dramaturgy Intern with Celise Kalke, Resident Dramaturg
and further expanded by entries from Joyce Annotated, by Don Gifford

In order of appearance in JAMES JOYCE'S THE DEAD.

Dublin
County and capitol city of Ireland (Eire). Setting for all stories in Dubliners.

Stoney Batter
A quay on the River Liffey, the river that runs through Dublin, opposite the quay that is called Usher's Island. A street of middle-class homes.

Usher’s Island
“Ush” on Dublin Map. It was (and is) a fairly bleak section of the quayside, just east of an industrial sprawl of the Guinness’s Brewery. A comparable section of Chicago might be houses off the Clybourn Corrider near the Chicago river.

Cornfactor
A factor is one who transacts business for another; an agent; a substitute; especially, a mercantile agent who buys and sells goods and transacts business for others in commission; a commission merchant or consignee. He may buy and sell in his own name, and he is entrusted with the possession and control of the goods; and in these respects he differs from a broker. So a cornfactor is an agent of corn.

Haddington Road
Road in Southeast Dublin. Affluent Dublin neighborhood.

The Academy
The Royal Irish Academy of Music, formerly the Ancient Concert Rooms, which were founded as a place for concerts by the Antient Concerts Society in 1843.

Kingstown, Dalkey Line
Kingstown was the name (under British rule) of the major Dublin port located some six miles south of Dublin; it is now called Dun Laoghaire. The “line” comprised of a railway connecting fashionable rural-suburban residential districts South of Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century.

Adam and Eve’s
Popular name for the Franciscan Church of St. Francis of Assisi in Merchant’s Quay, the south bank of the Liffey just east of Usher’s Island.

Aunt Julia’s retirement
In the short story, Aunt Julia was forced to retire because the Pope declared women could no longer sing in the choir, since it had a liturgical function. So Aunt Julia was replaced by a boy soprano.

Mrs. Cassidy and Mary Grimes
Possibly this is a reference to a pair of stock Dublin characters like the Pat and Mike of Irish jokes.

Take a cab back
If the story is set in January 1904, the last train from Dublin to Monkstown would have departed at 11:15, and (in the story) it is after 10 pm when Gabriel and Gretta arrive. So the party goes into the wee hours of the morning.

Monkstown
In 1904 an attractive and relatively affluent village on the South side of Dublin Bay, five miles from the center of the city. So Monkstown is about as far away from the center of town as Hyde Park is from the Loop.

Merrion
Town in County of Dublin, about three and a half miles from the center of Dublin.

Galoshes
In later use: An over-shoe (usually made of india-rubber) worn to protect the ordinary shoe from wet or dirt. Although introduced in 1847, they were not yet fashionable or popular.

Gutterperchas
Nowadays galoshes (overshoes) are usually plastic, but they were first made of rubber, and thus the word derives from the Malaysian for gum tree -- getah percha.

The continent
Meaning The European continent, referring at this time to all of Europe West of Russia.

Palaver
a. Applied contemptuously to (what is considered) unnecessary, profuse, or idle talk; ‘jaw’. b. Talk intended to cajole, flatter, or wheedle.

“A crow to pluck with you”
The Irish equivalent of "a bone to pick."

"Innocent Amy”
Another popular Irish exclamation, implying uninformed gullibility.

Daily Express
An Irish paper published in Dublin (1851-1921), essentially conservative and opposed to Irish independence. Its announced editorial policy involved “the development of industrial resources” and a reconciliation of “the right and impulses of Irish nationality with the demands and obligations of imperial dominions.” (Joyce Annotated)

West Briton
The appellation comes from the fact that Ireland lies to the west of England; the highly derogatory term referred to inhabitants of Ireland whose allegiance was more to England than to Ireland.

Aran Islands
Islands off the western coast of Galways county. They were regarded as an ideal by the Celtic Renaissance because Irish was spoken and a simple agrarian life was led.

“The properly patriotic Irish Revivalist regarded the isles as an Irish utopia since the natives still spoke Irish and lived in what was sentimentally regarded as true Irish fashion (i.e., in 18th century poverty and superstition).” (Joyce Annotated)

Connaught
Connaught is the poorest part of the Irish republic lying in the western and northwestern areas of the island. Its eastern boundary is the middle course of the River Shannon.

Irish
Also called Erse, or Gaelic, a Celtic language, spoken in Ireland. In literature, the real glory of Irish verse lay in anonymous poets who composed poems such as the famous address to Pangur, a white cat. In the late literature (17th century to the end of the 19th) authorship passed into the hands of individuals among the peasants, the class to which most Irish speakers had been reduced, using the dialects into which the language had been broken up. The subsequent revival (largely by middle-class English speaking intellectuals) has continued to the present day. Irish is now an official language of Ireland and mandatory for some civil servants.

Michael William Balfe
Singer and composer, best known for the facile melody and simple vocal effects of his opera The Bohemian Girl.

Killarney
Town in southwest county of Kerry.

Galway
County and town on the west coast of Ireland.

Killarney Lakes
Consist of three lakes in the South-West corner of Ireland: Upper Lake, Muckross Lake, Lough Leane, the last being the largest at 4,500 acres, connected with sea by R Laune.

Kate Kearney
This song is sung by another Dubliners characters (a young middle-class woman performing for a Nationalist gathering) in the story “A Mother.”

“Spicy Gale”
A gale is a wind, but an older use of the word means song. So the song Kate Kearney is using both senses at the same time.

Screwed
drunk

The pledge
of abstinence, in other words to make a New Year’s resolution or religious oath to stop drinking, which Freddy breaks only days later.

Parnell
Although a Protestant, an Irish nationalist, member of the British Parliament (1875–91), and the leader of the struggle for Irish Home Rule in the late 19th century. In 1889–90 he was ruined by proof of his adultery with Katherine O'Shea, whom he subsequently married. His death in 1891 symbolized the end of a dream of nonviolent negotiated peaceful separation with England, and also was one of Joyce’s most significant memories of his childhood.

Ballyshannon
City in the northwest county of Donegal.

Erne
Irish Loch Éirne lake in Fermanagh district (established 1973), formerly County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. It is 40 miles (64 km) long and has an average width of 5 miles (8 km) and a maximum depth of 200 feet (60 m). The lake consists of the shallow Upper Lough Erne, 12 miles (19 km) long, and Lower Lough Erne, 18 miles (29 km) long, linked by a 10-mile (16-kilometre) strait that is part of the River Erne. The lakes lie in an almost level carboniferous limestone plateau. Although formed by the solution of limestone, their basins are blanketed with heavy boulder clays. The level in the upper lake is subject to fluctuations because of the constricted flow produced by these glacial features. Numerous islands dot the lakes and provide recreation facilities

Methodist preachers
The Methodists were the most puritanical of the English protestants (as opposed to the Church of England). Browne is an Irish protestant, hence Gretta’s comment to him.

Crowns
A coin (when last minted, silver) of Great Britain of the value of five shillings; hence the sum of five shillings.

Jorum
A large drinking-bowl or vessel; also, the contents of this; esp. a bowl of punch.

Smyrna Figs
Smyrna-type figs develop only when fertile seeds are present, and these seeds account for the generally excellent quality and nutty flavor of the fruit.

The Theatre Royal
The theatre was “royal” both in name and by royal patent, founded in the 1630s. A new building was constructed in 1821, burned in 1880, and rebuilt in 1897. One of the three major theatres in Dublin at the turn of the century. In 1904, the Theatre Royal was primarily used for dramatic presentations, the Gaiety Theatre for musical events, and the Queen’s Theatre for everything else.

The Gaiety
The Gaiety theater, on South King Street, near Stephen's Green, opened in 1871 (the play was Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer).

"The Pantomime”
The English version of the pantomime focused on popular folk tales (rather than mythology) and featured mime acting, burlesque dialogue, music, and dancing by a Clown and a Harlequin, among others. Pantomime was - and is - a popular tradition at Christmas time.

There’s a negro chieftain leading every chorus in the panto
On 16 June 1904, the Theatre Royal (not the Gaity) advertised a double feature, the first half of which was “an American Eccentric Comedy-Oddity. . . funnier than a pantomime.” The second half of the program was a song and dance recital by the American Negro impersonator, Eugene Stratton (Eugene Augustus Ruhlmann, 1861-1918). (Joyce Annotated)

Gresham
Was and still is a fashionable hotel in then Sackville, now O’Connell Street, in east-central Dublin north of the Liffey. That the Conroys [can stay there overnight] indicates financial well-being (Joyce Annotated). A contemporary parallel would be someone from Chicago avoiding a late-night trip from the Loop to, say, Lake Forest by staying at the Drake.

Mignon
The source for this opera (1866) by Ambroise Thomas is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. One of the most popular 19th century operas. It focuses on a gypsy girl, Mignon, of noble birth. In the course of the opera, Mignon loses her wits through the suffering of unrequited love and the shock of being trapped in a burning castle. Miraculous coincidence restores sanity and resolved all at the opera’s end. (Joyce Annotated)

Georgina Burns
Source unknown, but probably a little known (outside of Dublin) English or Irish singer. Probably in a similar league to Parkinson.

Trebelli
Zelia Trebelli (1838-1892) was a French mezzo soprano who was extraordinarily popular in London. (Joyce Annotated)

Giulini
Guiglini (1827-1865) was a Italian opera tenor who sang in London and whose career ended when he became insane.

“Let Me Like A Soldier Fall”
An aria from the opera Maritana (Libretto by Edward Fitzball, music by William Vincent Wallace, 1845), in which the hero manages to switch his death from hanging to the more honorable one of death by firing squad.

Yes! let me like a Soldier fall,
Upon some open plain;
The breast expanding for the ball,
To blot out every stain.
Brave, manly hearts, confer my doom,
That gentler ones may tell,
However forgot, unknown my tomb,
I like a Soldier fell,
Howe’er forgot, unknown my tomb,
I like a Soldier fell!

Dinorah
Popular name for the French opera Le Parden de Poërmel (1859) by Meyerbeer. The opera was popular with florid sopranos since throughout most of the opera the heroine, Dinorah, wanders about demented by the loss of her lover and by the coincidence of other disasters, such as the thunderbolt that strikes her house as she is about to be married. The plot is a gothic web of sorcerers and treasure with a curse on it. At the climax of the opera, Dinorah plunges into a raging torrent and is rescued both physically and mentally by her former fiancé. (Joyce Annotated)

Lucrezia Borgia
Italian Opera. This opera was another favorite vehicle for the florid soprano, largely because the title role gives such scope for flamboyant performance. Lucrezia (a historical character) is portrayed as the arch-poisoner, and the opera climaxes in a banquet scene with a mass poisoning revealed by Lucrezia’s announcement that coffins have been provided for all the guests. (Joyce Annotated)

Caruso
Perhaps the most famous Italian tenor before Pavarotti.

Parkinson
Some commentators think Aunt Kate is confused here, that there is no singer by that name, but she might have had in mind an unimportant singer of the period named Parkinson who was a member of the Carl Rosa Opera Company.

Mount Melleray
The popular name for a Cistercian (Trappist) abbey, the Abbey of St Bernard de Trappe, in the southeastern county of Waterford famous as a retreat for the cure of alcoholics.

The Three Graces
In Greek mythology, the daughters of Zeus and Eurynome: Agalaia (Brilliance), Euphorosyne (Joy) and Thalia (Bloom)—the inspirers of those qualities which give charm to nature and to wisdom, love, social intercourse, etc. (Joyce Annotated)

Highland Fling
national dance of Scotland. A vigorous dance requiring delicate balance and precision, it was probably originally a victory dance for a solo male dancer, performed after battle. It is performed in 4/4 time and consists of a series of intricate steps performed on one spot. Especially characteristic is a light step in which the dancer hops on one foot while moving the other foot in front of and in back of the calf.

Academy piece
A piece designed to display Mary Jane’s technical skills and thus her qualifications as a piano teacher. (Joyce Annotated)

Murdered princes in the tower
The two sons of the English King Edward IV, who according to Shakespeare were murdered at the behest of their uncle King Richard III in order to secure his succession to the throne. In the 19th century, the dead princes were often portrayed laying on a bed after having been smothered, or sometimes playing together in the Tower innocent of knowledge of the doom.

Tabinet
a fabric like poplin with a watered (or wavy) surface, could also be silk and wool resembling poplin: chiefly associated with Ireland.

Mulberry buttons
May be a particular kind of button, but probably just round mulberry-colored (a shade of purple) buttons.

Man-o-war suit
A sailor suit (a man-o-war is a combatant war-ship).

Good spanking goer
meaning a good fast horse

Trap
colloquial term for a wagon or a simple carriage

Their grandfather
Aunt Julia means Patrick Morkan is Mary-Jane and Gabriel’s grandfather.

Glue-boiler
Glue strong liquid adhesive obtained by boiling collagenous animal parts such as bones, hides, and hooves into hard gelatin and then adding water. So Aunt Julia is remembering the boiling vats of animal parts in her father’s mill.

Starch mill
Starch is any of various substances, such as natural starch, used to stiffen cloth, as in laundering. Starch is one form of glue although starch is usually made from plants – Gabriel and Julia are and aren’t talking about the same thing.

Stock Collar-
A long white neckcloth worn as part of a formal riding habit, or Mr. Morkan’s closest approximation.

Back Lane-
A street in a rundown area in central Dublin south of the Liffey.

King Billy’s Statue
The Protestant King William III of England, William of Orange (b.1650, reigned 1689-1702). His total subjugation of Ireland began when he defeated the Irish at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. The statue, set up in 1701, was on College Green, opposite both Trinity and the Parliament. Even the Irish in favor of union with England disliked having to continually face the horse's arse. The statue suffered much abuse throughout its history.

Le Droghe D’amore
The Editors believe Nelson made this opera up, although the plot is sort of borrowed by The Elixir of Love by Donizetti.

Quay
An artificial bank or landing-place, built of stone or other solid material, lying along or projecting into a navigable water for convenience of loading and unloading ships.

Heliotrope Envelope
Heliotrope is a grayish purple color. Gabriel is probably remembering a love letter or some other letter of a personal nature. Or it might just have been a letter accepting an invitation.

Henry Street
In 1900 a street of modestly prosperous small shops in central Dublin north of the Liffey, also mentioned in the Dubliners’ story “Clay”. (Joyce Annotated)

Walk with
shortened from go out walking with Irish colloquialism for “we were dating” or perhaps “courting.” The implication is that they met and walked in full view of their neighbors and thus were chaperoned.

Leaving Galway
Gretta in the story lived with her Grandmother in the country, and was sent to a convent school. So she was leaving the West (Irish) side of Ireland for the urban (English-influenced) Eastern coast.

I think he died for me
I don’t think Gretta is consciously quoting, but in Yeats’s 1902 play Cathleen ni Houlihan, Cathleen, the Poor Old Woman, is the embodiment of Ireland who, though old and withered, appears young and beautiful to true patriots. She is asked about a martyr-patriot, “yellowed-haired Donough that was hanged in Galway,” and she responds, “He died for love of me: many a man has died for love of me.” In the story there are clues that Michael died of tuberculosis, which is why Gretta was not allowed to see him before she left.

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OTHER RESOURCES

Books:
Dubliners by James Joyce, the Viking Critical Library edition
James Joyce by Richard Ellman: the basic biography
Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Don Gifford
James Joyce’s Ireland by David Pierce

Films:
"The Dead" directed by John Houston starring Angelica Houston
"Michael Collins" About one of the leading figures in the Irish independence movement.

Pictures:
Ireland of One Hundred Years Ago by David Harkness (photograph collection)
Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political edited by Declan McGonagle, Fintan O’Toole, and Kim Levin (which inspired the set design for Court’s production of JAMES JOYCE'S THE DEAD)

Principal Works of James Joyce with publication date:
Fiction: Dubliners, 1914; A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, 1916; Ulysses, 1922; Finnegans Wake, 1939; Stephen Hero, 1944; Giacomo Joyce, 1968.
Poetry: Chamber Music, 1907; Collected Poems, 1936.
Letters: Gilbert, S. (ed.) The Letters of James Joyce, Vol 1, 1957, Ellmann, R. (ed) Vols 2 and 3, 1966.
Play: Exiles, 1918.
Selections: Levin, H. (ed.) The Portable James Joyce, 1947, The Essential James Joyce, 1948; Connolly, T. E. James Joyce's Scribbledhobble, 1961; Scholes, R. and Kain, R. M. (eds.) The Workshop of Daedalus, 1965. The James Joyce Quarterly 1963--(contains an annual bibliography). Also: James Joyce Archives, 64 vols, 1979.

World Wide Web:
Text of Dubliners: http://www.classicreader.com/author.php/aut.85/
Biography: http://www.hwwilson.com/print/joyce.html

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