A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners - James Joyce [15]
Dettmar is currently researching and writing two studies that reflect the range of his scholarly interests: one, a book on the cultural history of the notion that “rock is dead,” and the other, a study of James Joyce’s relationship to the Great Books tradition.
NOTE ON CURRENCY AND COINAGE
During the early years of the twentieth century, during which the events of the Dubliners stories and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man take place, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom and used British money.
Until Great Britain switched to a decimal system for its money in 1971, with 100 pence to the pound, British money followed a somewhat idiosyncratic system. The chart below gives the primary denominations of pre-1971 British money, along with any slang terms, and the approximate buying power these denominations would have represented in 1910, given in current (2004) U.S. dollars.
NOTE ON THE TEXTS
The copy text for our edition of Dubliners is the 1914 first edition (first printing), published in London by Grant Richards; that for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1916 first edition (fifth printing, 1922) published in New York by W. B. Huebsch. Many factors have contributed to the appearance of errors in these early editions; Joyce complained to Richards, for instance, that he read the page proofs of Dubliners very quickly because he expected to be sent a second set of proofs, which never materialized. For this edition obvious errors have been silently emended.
The punctuation of direct speech in Joyce’s fiction is an area that has attracted a good deal of scholarly attention over the years. In standard British usage—and though an Irishman, Joyce wrote as a (somewhat reluctant) British subject until Irish independence was granted in 1922—direct speech is ordinarily indicated by enclosure between single quotation marks, or inverted commas:
‘He was too scrupulous always, ’ she said.
Joyce thought this convention unsightly; he referred jokingly to the punctuation as “perverted commas,” and pleaded with the London publisher of Dubliners to use dashes instead to indicate direct speech. As it was first typeset, Dubliners did in fact indicate direct speech by enclosing it between em-dashes:
—He was too scrupulous always,—she said.
But this edition, printed for Maunsel & Co. in Dublin, was destroyed before being distributed, and this typography never saw the light of day (Maunsel feared being sued for obscenity and/or libel). When the book was re-set for the Richards publication, the dashes were changed back to the conventional inverted commas.
With A Portrait, however, Joyce got something closer to his wishes. The Huebsch edition indicates direct speech with an introductory dash:
—0, Stephen will apologise.
But the convention in this edition is employed inconsistently; indeed, the very next quotation on the same page uses not just a single introductory dash, but a closing dash as well:
—0, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.—
For the most part, the first half of the novel punctuates direct speech with a single, introductory dash; but halfway through the novel, the convention switches to both introductory and closing dashes, with no apparent textual logic to support the switch.
Finally, British publishing conventions dictate that for a quotation embedded within direct speech, double quotation marks be enclosed within single quotation marks:
‘Annoyed! Not he! “Manly little chap! ” he said.’
In the early printings of Portrait, however, in which dashes are used to introduce direct speech, italics are (irregularly) used to indicate a quotation within direct speech, and that convention has been adopted in this edition:
—Annoyed! Not he! Manly little chap, he said.
Given this hodgepodge of editorial decisions—and with