Throughout the period when Joyce struggled to publish his collection of stories, he engaged in a wide correspondence with publishers, family, friends, other authors and even the King of England! The correspondence reveals the frustration he felt during the period but it also helps us to shed some light on how Joyce himself perceived the stories. In one letter to Grant Richards dated 5 May 1906, he wrote: “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 centre 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 dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. I cannot do any more than this. I cannot alter what I have written.” A month later, on 23 June 1906, he ended another letter to Richards by saying: “It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”
Press ‘A’ to learn about the evolution of the stories... Press ‘B’ to learn more about Joyce’s difficulties publishing Dubliners… Press ‘C’ to listen to an excerpt from one of Joyce’s letters to Grant Richards…