"Araby" in Context: The "Splendid Bazaar," Irish Orientalism, and James Clarence

Mangan
Author(s): Heyward Ehrlich
Source: James Joyce Quarterly , Winter - Spring, 1998, Vol. 35, No. 2/3, ReOrienting
Joyce (Winter - Spring, 1998), pp. 309-331
Published by: University of Tulsa

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25473908

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 "Araby" in Context: The "Splendid Bazaar,"
Irish Orientalism, and James Clarence Mangan
Heyward Ehrlich
Rutgers University

The story based on an actual incident in Joyce's life, "Araby," is

often read on a single internal plane for its quest symbolism, its
allegory of creativity, or its richness of style. But "Araby" also
draws significantly upon three external contexts, namely the histori
cal, the literary, and the biographical. Although it may seem a work of
independent invention, "Araby" refers directly to an actual bazaar
that visited Dublin in 1894, which was not only a memorable local
entertainment event but also one of a series of major local annual
events. "Araby" also evokes the distinctive version of Irish
Orientalism that looked to the East for the highest sources of nation
al identity and the very origins of the Irish language, alphabet, and
people. Writing both within and against the moment of the Celtic
revival, Joyce defined his place within the tradition of Irish
Orientalism by writing two biographical essays on the Irish poet and
Orientalist James Clarence Mangan in 1902 and 1907, the composition
of which closely bracketed and heavily shaped the writing of
"Araby," as Joyce acknowledges by naming an essential character in
the story after Mangan. The local Dublin reader, to whom Joyce large
ly directed "Araby" when he wrote it in 1905, already knew a great
deal about the several contexts of the story, the annual bazaars and
fairs such as Araby, the long literary and even musical tradition of
Irish Orientalism, and perhaps even something of the place of
Mangan in the Celtic Revival. These external and social contexts of
"Araby" come into dynamic opposition to the internal and private
culture of the boy's narrative in the voice of the first person narrator,
a more mature version of the young protagonist, who repeatedly
warns the reader against the boy's characteristic confusion and follies.
Joyce used a sense of exact historical referentiality in his early fic
tion significantly to affect readers and critics, though he was fully
aware that some might take his stories as "a caricature of Dublin life"
(LettersII 99) or as a satire in his "nicely polished looking-glass"
(LettersI 64); only a few months before writing "Araby," he hoped to
extend his work into a second series to be called "Provincials"

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 (LettersII 92). The historical details in Dubliners mattered so much to
him that, when the publisher Maunsel and Company threatened in
1913 to change "the name of restaurants, cake-shops, railway stations,
public houses, laundries, bars and other places of business," Joyce
hired two solicitors to support him in firmly preserving these detailed
Dublin references (LettersII 325).u Araby" is the only story in Dubliners
to be based on a famous public event; yet as historical details come to
light about the immense, sprawling, noisy Araby bazaar that actually
visited Dublin in 1894, they seem paradoxically to contrast with the
small, dark, quiet charity sale that the boy depicts in the story. When
Joyce wrote "Araby" in 1905, and even when he published it in 1914,
a sizable fraction of the Dublin audience had attended and could still
remember the Araby bazaar of 1894 and similar bazaars that took
place each year after 1892. Thus, the narrator's warnings about the
boy's "foolish blood," "confused adoration," and "innumerable fol
lies" (D 30, 31, 32) refer not only to the boy's youthful infatuation in
the story but also to the effects of that infatuation in the distortion of
the immediate historical context already familiar to the knowledge
able Dublin reader. Joyce scholars have already offered several expla
nations of the problem in "Araby" of the narrator's apparent distance
in "looking back at the boy, detachedly and judicially,"1 in his intro
duction of the element of "dissonant self-narration,"2 and in his role
as a Lacanian "Other."3 The new historical evidence suggests, more
over, that the narratological issue in the story rests on the deeper
question of why Joyce's representational methodology in depicting
the bazaar stands opposed to the shared social knowledge of his orig
inal Dublin readers.
Although Joyce is known to have visited the Araby bazaar of 1894,
it is no longer possible to regard "Araby" merely as a faithful render
ing of his experience. Stanislaus Joyce warned us long ago that most
of Dubliners was "pure fiction" and that "Araby," for example, takes
from Joyce's personal experiences only the North Richmond Street
house and the juvenile gangs: "The rest of the story of 'Araby' is pure
ly imaginary."4 Although Richard Ellmann shows in his biography of
Joyce that there was an actual Araby bazaar that visited Dublin in
May 1894, Ellmann accepts everything recounted in the story as
though it were a direct and accurate account of an episode in Joyce's
life, asking us to believe that it was "perhaps described much as it
happened"; Ellmann conflates the boy's uncle and Joyce's father
when he speaks of "his uncle's (his father's?) consent" and goes so far
as to read the text of the story as though it were taking place in real
time: "the boy went anyway, and by the time he arrived, the bazaar
was virtually over; the lights were going out, the merriment had
ceased" (JJII40n). Finally, "Araby" becomes for Ellmann both signifi

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er and signified, the emblem and the substance of Joyce's growth as
an artist: "The writing of Stephen Hero enabled Joyce, like the little boy
in 'Araby/ to carry his chalice among a crowd of foes" (JJII 149).
Although "Araby" can be viewed as the "autobiographical nexus"
from which all of Joyce's subsequent writings flow, leading to the
interpretation of "Araby" as "a portrait of the artist as a young boy,"5
recent biographical research has moved away from construing the
story simply as a mirror of Joyce's life.
Joyce's classmate William Fall?n recalled seeing Joyce at the Araby
bazaar not as the solitary figure in the text but rather as someone
amidst the jam at the rail station:

I had just got off the train at Lansdowne Road when I spied him.
The train used to draw in on the main line and then go into a sid
ing to let off visitors to the bazaar. It was a Saturday night. When
we reached the bazaar it was just clearing up. It was very late. I
lost Joyce in the crowd, but I could see that he was disheartened
over something. I recall, too, that Joyce had had some difficulty
for a week or so previously in extracting the money for the
bazaar from his parent.6

In the tale, the boy arrives by himself on a deserted train at closing

time, but Fall?n sees "Joyce in the crowd" near the station on a plat
form filled with many people less concerned by the late hour.
Peter Costello, in his biography, goes even further in arguing that
Joyce transformed a different event into fictional form in "Araby."7
For Costello, the actual Araby bazaar was more a "gala fund-raising
event" than the modest charity bazaar in the story, and other details
of Joyce's life were "largely changed from his own experience" when
he used them in the text (129). Costello connects the boy's conflict at
the Araby bazaar to Joyce's private disappointment at failing to get a
part in the annual Belvedere Whitsun week school play of 12 May
1894, performed just two days before the opening of the bazaar: "The
turmoil of his story, though largely changed from his own experience,
was real enough. But who 'Mangan's sister' was?in whom the
young boy had such an interest?no record now exists to suggest"
(129). Although Costello could not identify "Mangan's sister" in con
temporary sources, he remains understandably curious as to why
Joyce should have used the significant name of Mangan.
We can better understand Joyce's curious representation of the his
torical bazaar of 1894 by reconstructing it in some detail from the
Araby in Dublin Official Catalogue* and contemporary Dublin newspa
per advertisements and reports. First, we discover that the actual 1894
Araby bazaar was not at all like the one-building charity affair
described in "Araby." Although Ellmann reproduced the artwork

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from the front cover of the Araby catalog (JJII Plate III) and referred to
its "merriment" (JJII 40), he gave no supporting details. The front
cover of the official catalogue refers to Araby not as a bazaar but as a
"Grand Oriental F?te," and the back cover lists these entertainments
and amusements:
"Araby" 1894
Magnificent Representation
Of
An Oriental City
Cairo Donkeys & Donkey Boys
An Arab Encampment
INTERNATIONAL TUG-OF-WAR.
Dances by 250 Trained Children.
Eastern Magic from the Egyptian Hall, London
CAF? CHANTANT, WITH ALL THE LATEST PARISIAN SUCCESSES
Skirt Dancing Up to Date
Tableaux, Theatricals, Christy Minstrels
Grand Theatre of Varieties
"The Alhambra," an Orchestra of 50 Performers
Switchback Railways and Roundabouts
"MENOTTI, " The King of the Air,
The Great Stockholm Wonder.
Bicycle Polo. Rifle & Clay Pigeon Shooting.
Dancing.
The Euterpean Ladies' Orchestra.
Eight Military Bands.
MAGNIFICENT DISPLAYS OF FIREWORKS,
By Brock, of the Crystal Palace, London
Admission One Shilling9

It is worth noting that Mangan's sister had in mind just such an

entertainment as this in looking forward to the "splendid bazaar":
"She asked me was I going to Arafry. I forget whether I answered yes
or no. It would be a splendid bazaar, she said; she would love to go"
(D 31). Although she cannot attend, Mangan's sister correctly under
stands that the Araby bazaar will be a festival of music, dancing, and
amusements. But the slightly younger boy can only think of trying to
please her with a fairing, a token or keepsake traditionally brought
back from a fair: "?If I go, I said, I will bring you something" (D
32).10
Joyce builds the story on the boy's juvenile misconception of the
Araby bazaar as primarily a place where keepsakes are sold. By con
trast, the historical Araby bazaar was a major public event, a huge
international commercial enterprise with attractions from as far away
as Galway London, Stockholm, and Chicago. It also served a local
charitable purpose in raising funds to lower the debt for the recon
struction of the Jarvis Street Hospital, which had helped 33,784 acci

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dent victims in 1893.10 Most of the entertainments and amusements
for Araby were arranged in England, and evidently the lion's share of
the production costs were fees for the English entrepreneurs: "The
builders of Araby, Messrs. Womersley and Company, of Leeds,
receive a few hundred pounds, and the contractors Messrs.
Goodfellow, receive a fair amount of money."12 The planning for the
Araby bazaar began a year in advance and entailed the placement of
1,200 "Araby in Dublin" posters in every railway station in Ireland,
England, and Scotland as well as in Cook's travel offices, supple
mented with placards in Dublin shops and streets, announcements
similar to the one advertising the Minis bazaar that Bloom encounters
in Ulysses (178.1162).13
The Araby bazaar further promoted itself throughout the United
Kingdom with a raffle of donated merchandise, including a diamond
tiara, a Chippendale sideboard, a polo cart, and a grand piano, a con
test echoed in Bloom's purchase of bazaar lottery tickets in Ulysses (U
12.776-77, 17.1790-91).14 Advertisements started well in advance in
several newspapers so as to promote the special railroad fares to
Dublin for Araby: "CHEAP EXCURSIONS/DURING THE WEEK
FROM/ALL PARTS OF IRELAND." The gross revenue for the entire
event was probably between ?13,000 and ?18,000, and possibly a
good deal more, since production costs were said to be between
?5,000 and ?6,000 and the net available after expenses for charity was
announced as ?8,000 to ?12,000. The local Dublin committee, uncer
tain as to the economic success of the event, had sold unlimited rights
to collect their own special admissions to the visiting sideshow oper
ators. Thus, the operators of Brock's fireworks and of Toogood's
amusement rides each paid ?200 for rights for the first week
(Toogood's paid ?75 more for two additional days of the second
week), and several other star performers made similar undisclosed
arrangements, all proving to be remarkably profitable investments for
the foreign operators.15 The bazaar stalls were also profitable for the
Dublin businessmen who used them not only to promote charity
through the donated items to be raffled off but also to display and sell
their own merchandise. The volunteer workers at the stalls, all
women and children, dressed themselves as far as possible in cos
tumes matching an Araby motif. In all, Araby embraced thirty-seven
charity stalls and forty-three entertainments, requiring a combined
staff of 1,760 stallholders and performers.16 The Irish Times printed an
estimated attendance total of 92,000 for the entire Araby bazaar, but
the Freeman's Journal made a slightly bolder claim, supporting it with
daily paid admissions counts (said to exclude exhibitors and workers)
as follows: Monday, 10,874, Tuesday, 7,933, Wednesday, 8,852,
Thursday, 15,214, Friday 21,500, Saturday 18,000, Monday, 9,000, and

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Tuesday, 9,500?"Thus more than 100,000 persons, or nearly one
third of the population of Dublin, visited the f?te."11 Indeed, the press
claimed with some justification that the annual Dublin charity
bazaars had become the largest of their kind in the United
Kingdom.18
The central feature of the Araby bazaar, its large construction of a
"[rjealistic representation of an Oriental city,"19 was a theatrical mi
crocosm in the tradition of nineteenth-century panoramas and diora
mas. Joyce refers throughout Ulysses to the similar Mirus bazaar, men
tioning, in particular, the opening of it by the viceroy (U 10.1268-70);
in the actual Araby fair, seventy-five dignitaries and titled members
of the nobility, including the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and the Lord
Mayor of Dublin, had lent their names as official patrons of the fair.
Unlike the bazaar in "Araby," a small, one-day affair, the historical
Araby bazaar lasted for more than a week and drew audiences that
ranked second only to the annual Dublin Horse Show, which also
used the same Royal Dublin Society grounds in Ballsbridge, a ten
minute trip by rail from central Dublin. Initially, all the regular Araby
events were to take place from Tuesday, 15 May, to Saturday, 19 May,
during the Whitsuntide holiday with some preliminary athletic
events on the previous Saturday, 12 May, and a twelve-hour special
preliminary "Gala F?te" on Whit Monday, 14 May, a bank holiday.
The regular fair hours were from 2:00 to 10:30 p.m. daily, and admis
sion was one shilling, plus extra charges for many of the sideshows
and special attractions. The charity stalls were located in the Central
Hall, but there were nine additional buildings or outdoor areas of
Araby devoted to entertainments, amusements, and refreshments: the
South Hall featured flower gardens, tea gardens, and orchestras, with
traditional amusements such as palmistry; the East Hall was noted
for its dining area, refreshments, and caf?s; the West Hall featured the
Egyptian Hall of Mystery and the Telephone Concert; the Paddock
Hall was home to the traditional amusements of dancing, theatricals,
and music hall; the Anglesea Hall contained several larger amuse
ments, including a concert hall, ballroom, theater, and shooting
gallery; the Grounds featured the outdoor attractions of the Caf?
Chantant (mentioned in the story?D 34-35), merry-go-rounds,
roundabouts, and swing boats; the Veterinary Paddock housed the
daily clay-pigeon shooting competitions; and finally, the Jumping
Enclosure provided space for the larger entertainments, including
Menotti's high wire act, Brock's fireworks, the Eiffel searchlight
tower, and cycling and bicycle-polo events. Two of these locations, the
Veterinary Paddock and the Jumping Enclosure, were named for their
equestrian functions. There were performances by a total of eight mil
itary bands.

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 There is some confusion in the use of the words "bazaar," "fair,"
and "f?te." The official Araby catalogue refers to the entire entertain
ment event as a "Grand Oriental F?te," as indicated, and to the char
ity stalls alone as the "Grand Oriental Fair." Although Thorn's Official
Directory of the United Kingdom for 1904 lists four businesses as
bazaars,20 in his writings, Joyce almost always uses bazaar to mean a
place of entertainment rather than a market. In A Portrait, young
Stephen Dedalus is called a "model youth" for avoiding three temp
tations: "He doesn't smoke and he doesn't go to bazaars and he
doesn't flirt" (P 76); in Ulysses, while Stephen vividly remembers the
sexual entertainments of Paris, Molly and Boy Ian first meet at a
bazaar dance (1/4.525-30, 15.2826-28). Indeed, the Dublin bazaars had
a very old reputation for sexual immorality The first medieval Irish
fair was established in 1204 in Donnybrook, the Dublin suburb direct
ly adjoining Ballsbridge, the site of Araby, eventually not only lend
ing its very name to violence and mayhem but also becoming notori
ous for widespread female drinking and sexual misconduct. Even the
regular importation of English entertainments and amusements at
Donnybrook after 1819 did not quell the mounting waves of moral
protest, which eventually led to its suppression after 1855.21 These
annual Donnybrook fairs were soon replaced by a series of industrial
and commercial Dublin shows, as recorded in the Dublin annals of
Thorn's for 1904: the Dublin International Exhibition of 1865, from 9
May to 9 November, which had drawn 900,000 people; the Dublin
Exhibition of Arts, Industries, and Manufacturers of 1872, which
opened 1 June and ran for 154 days and 58 evenings, attracting
420,000 people; and the Masonic Centenary Exhibition and Bazaar for
the Masonic Female Orphan's School, which opened 17 May 1892, the
first of the series of annual Dublin charity bazaars that was to include
Araby two years later. This 1892 fair is confusedly remembered by the
boy's aunt in the story as "some Freemason affair," and the name of
Mrs. Mercer, the pawnbroker's widow who collects used stamps for
"some pious purpose" (D 32, 33), alludes to the May 1904 Mirus
Bazaar for Mercer Hospital, which Joyce immortalized in Ulysses,
moving it to 16 June 1904 (U8.1162-63, 10.1268-69, 13.1166-67).
As a syndicated international f?te of traveling entertainments and
amusements, the Araby bazaar reflected both its English origins and
the local sharing of Anglo-Irish culture in subtle ways, celebrating
British rule in a theater called the "Empire" and in a tableau vivant rep
resenting a scene called "Britain and her Colonies," according to the
Araby in Dublin Official Catalogue (61). Tickets for merchandise to be
raffled off were called "ballots," a conflation of commercialism and
enfranchisement. There was an imperial British attitude, simultane
ously arrogant and naive, in claiming, as the Official Catalogue does,

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 that each attendant for the garden seats of the Arab Encampment
"speaks a foreign language" and that the Cairo Donkeys and Donkey
Boys had an "Oriental" in attendance, as though all foreign languages
were the same or all "Orientals" were alike (53, 73). The press linked
Dublin to London as the other major British city included in the itin
erary of the current traveling bazaar, taking pride in the fact that
"Araby in Dublin" was scheduled before rather than after its sister
bazaar, "Constantinople in London."22 Araby made a show of scien
tific and technological progress (which Joyce satirized at length in the
"Circe" episode of Ulysses) in the displays that featured recent inven
tions such as the Telephone Concerts from Belfast, the electric search
light display, and the use of electric lanterns at night on a scale then
unprecedented in Dublin.23 But some attractions were more pseudo
scientific than scientific, such as the claim, in the Araby in Dublin
Official Catalogue, of the "Eiffel Search-Light Tower," said to be "80
FEET HIGH, Imported for ARABY directly from Chicago": "This pow
erful light will turn night into day and when flashed on the Moon at
9 p.m. at night, the Man will be distinctly visible to the naked eye"
(73)
Many of the amusements, such as s?ances, tableaux, and mirror
and lighting effects were typical components of the traveling fairs and
f?tes of the precinematic era.24 In the smaller Irish county fairs, safely
removed from the watchful eye of Dublin authorities, a strong under
current of Irish nationalism could be found in the only entertainment
available, the ballad singer whose songs contained covert political
messages.25 But in "Araby," these nationalist ballads are performed
far outside the Araby bazaar by "street-singers, who sang a come-all
you about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our
native land" (D 31), allusions to the notorious harshness of the British
towards imprisoned Irish nationalists and indifference to Irish suffer
ing during the famine.26 Moreover, the mass scale of Araby and the
impersonal, commercial quality of its physical entertainment and
material amusements seem to have eclipsed any political meanings
that might have been found in ethnically designated performances,
such as the Irish songs, Irish dances, or even Irish fireworks. Instead,
the volunteer workers in the stalls expressed themselves through
their own costumes, many representing Arabian, Ottoman, Egyptian,
Moorish, Spanish, Gypsy, Mediterranean, Deccan, Hindu, and even
Japanese expressions of the Araby theme or its Middle Eastern or
Oriental variations.
Although "Constantinople in London" might reflect the view of
sophisticated British and European travelers who, since 1883, could
take the Orient Express train twice a week directly from Paris to
Constantinople, by contrast "Araby in Dublin" was associated with

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more distant Moorish and Spanish cultures, the press likening its
large constructed Oriental replica to "a city like Algeria [sic] or
Granada."27 The Irish-Spanish-Moorish link became explicit in the
theme of the Gal way stall, "Algeciras" (31), the Andalusian port
opposite Gibraltar. Joyce reminds us that Galway, often known as the
"Spanish city" of Ireland, was reputedly settled by "Spanish stock"
and was still famed for the "Spanish type" in its population, antici
pating the Galway-Gibraltar-Semitic association that he made in con
necting Nora and Molly Bloom (CW 229).28 Joyce elsewhere used
some of the same geographical landmarks to define the linguistic
domination of Latin at its height as extending "from Gibraltar to
Arabia, and to the stranger-hating Briton" (CW 30). The range of the
Dublin costumes defined the domain of Araby in the popular mind as
the zone of the ancient Near East and the Phoenician Mediterranean
associated with the old Irish myths, but the politically astute could
see Araby also as the community of exclusion just outside the main
perimeter of Anglo-Saxon political domination and western
European hegemony. Joyce, already very sensitive to how language,
literature, and culture defined nationality, may have felt a kinship
with the East in reporting from Austria shortly before writing
"Araby" the fact that Berlitz, his multinational employer, operated
from its Vienna office all its outposts in "Austria-Hungary, Italy,
Switzerland, Turkey, Greece, Egypt" (LettersII 84)
Had Mangan's sister in the story come to the actual Araby bazaar,
she would have discovered the extent to which popular entertain
ments and amusements were associated with eastern and Oriental
exoticism. In the West Hall, she would have encountered the
Egyptian Hall of Mystery, featuring James Stuart, from the Egyptian
Hall, Piccadilly, London, in his "Marvelous S?ance Mystique" (57),
the tableaux vivants of Androeikonismata, including such oriental or
exotic motifs as the "Graces Decorating a Statue," "Night Attack by
Matabele," "Espanita: A Spanish Restaurant on a F?te Day," and final
ly the previously mentioned number, "Britain and her Colonies" (31,
57). In addition, she would also have found in the Paddock Hall the
"Empire" theater, with skirt and serpentine dancing, Spanish lady
guitarists, and the Princess Nala Damajante, the "Hindoo Serpent
Charmer with Her Boa Constrictors and Pythons," and in Anglesey
Hall, the Alhambra Theater offering "musical, histrionic, terpsichore
an, and acrobatic entertainment" (61, 63, 65) The Caf? Chantant was
actually located in the Grounds, where it featured French, German,
Italian, Spanish, English, and Irish songs, piano and violin solos,
recitations, dances, and many other attractions. The Grounds also had
Toogood's "Merry-Go-Rounds, Ships in Full Sail, American Swing
Boats, And all the latest novelties in Locomotion," anticipating the

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hobbyhorse rides that Joyce included in "Circe" (U 15.2719, 4109). It
is hard to know what to make of the presence at Araby of Mrs. Cohen,
a gypsy queen at the Arab Encampment, and Master Cohen, a violin
prodigy of eight at the Caf? Chantant, who may have been mother
and son, suggesting some possible familial tradition in these traveling
entertainments that Joyce later incorporated into "Circe" by giving
Bella Cohen, whoremistress, a son she supposedly supports at Oxford
(1/15.1289).29
The two attractions that dominated Araby were the fireworks and
the high-wire act. Brock's Fireworks, specializing in narratives of "a
magnitude and brilliancy never before seen in Ireland," featured east
ern motifs for the occasion in the form of the "Grand Naval
Spectacular Device, The Battle of the Nile (first time in Ireland)," the
"Marvelous Transformation Device, Araby (new)," and the "Triple
Device, The Oriental Mystic Fountains (first time)" (77, 78), the addi
tional admission charge being 6 d. (2s 6d. for reserved seats). Brock's
shaped and narrative fireworks anticipate the fantasy in "Circe,"
where the "Mirus bazaar ?reworks go up from all sides with symbolical
phallopyrotechnic designs" (U 15.1494), and fireworks elsewhere in
Ulysses (U 13.680-86, 1166-68). Nearby, the crowds wondered at
"Menotti, the King of the Air: The Great Stockholm Wonder," who
performed in the Jumping Enclosure at 4:30 and 9:30 P.M. each day
with his "Marvelous and Sensational Performance on the High Wire"
(75), which was illuminated in the evening by the electric searchlight
in the background.30 Thanks to its dazzling electric amusements and
pyrotechnic entertainments, Araby seemed unusually attractive at
night; after dark on Friday, for example, attendance was estimated at
12,000 and 15,000, about two-thirds the daily total of 21,500.31
Friday night was intended to be the climax of the bazaar, according
to the official catalogue, and the attractions were to taper off gradual
ly on Saturday until closing time at 10:30 P.M. Therefore, in Joyce's
story, by the time of the boy's arrival on Saturday at 9:50 P.M., he
would have had only a few minutes in which to complete his mission
before closing time on the last night of the Araby bazaar. But, in real
ity, the schedule was altered after it rained earlier in the week. The
new fair hours were extended until 11:30 P.M. on Friday and Saturday
nights, and direct trains (the boy in the story arrives on just such a
train) were provided to and from the Araby site in Ballsbridge
between 7:00 and 11:30 P.M. In fact, these special trains were so suc
cessful in bringing immense crowds to Araby on Friday night that a
two-hour "crush at the turnstiles" developed, requiring the interven
tion of the police.31 Extra Saturday night events were added, includ
ing performances every thirty minutes at the Caf? Chantant until
10:30 P.M., an additional night session of Brock's fireworks, and a final

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high-wire performance by Menotti at 9:15 or 9:30 P.M.33 Thus,
Saturday night rivaled Friday night at the Araby fair, and the momen
tum carried over to the added evening sessions on Monday and
Tuesday of the following week. Perhaps the extended late Saturday
night entertainments may explain why the gate attendant in the story
accepts the boy's admission fee at 9:50 P.M. even though the charity
portion of the bazaar is closing. At 9:50 P.M., the actual Caf? Chantant
was still in operation, with two more lively shows, said always to be
full, still to come at 10:00 and 10:30 P.M.34 If the charity stalls were
empty or closed in the Central Hall after 9:50 P.M. on Saturday night,
it was because the main events of the evening, the spectacular fire
works and the high-wire acts, had drawn the crowds to the Grounds
and the Jumping Enclosure only a few minutes before.
The knowledgeable Dublin reader who knew the minutiae of the
historical 1894 Dublin bazaar might well wonder why so few signifi
cant details survive in Joyce's text. Perhaps 6,000 people were still
actively enjoying themselves in several brightly lighted sites of the
actual Araby bazaar at 9:50 P.M. on Saturday evening, 19 May 1894, at
the very moment that Joyce's story describes only six persons in one
closing building. The actual Caf? Chantant had several packed per
formances still to come at that hour in the bustling Grounds, but its
counterpart in the story is shown as already closed amidst darkening
charity stalls. Even the detail in the text of the "great jars that stood
like eastern guards" (D 35) at the charity stall seems to echo an Ara
bian Nights tale more than the actual Araby bazaar.
But the strongest social reality that the knowledgeable Dubliner
could bring to bear on the event was the awareness of the sheer mag
nitude and scale of the Araby bazaar, attended by some 100,000 peo
ple, requiring 1,760 workers, and grossing ?18,000 or more. These cir
cumstances focus critical attention not only on the matter of the boy's
money but also on corresponding business details in the background
of the story. For example, in the final scene, the boy's thoughts are
diverted by the significant iteration of three triads involving money:
"two men were counting money on a salver," two men talk to the girl
in the sales stall, and the boy lets "two pennies ... fall against the six
pence" in his pocket (D 35). The boy's hope to find an affordable and
appropriate gift for Mangan's sister vanishes as he sees at the stall
only an array of "porcelain vases and flowered tea-sets" (D 35). Even
though the boy is running out of time and money, these domestic
ornaments for an aspiring Victorian household are utterly inappro
priate for him as a personal keepsake because porcelain and tea, as
commodities of the Far East trade, which the Dublin reader would
immediately realize, were obvious emblems of British economic colo
nialism. Sadly, any of the boy's well-intentioned attempts to win the

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girl's esteem with a gift rather than with his deeds would degrade his
chivalry into simony, the theme of the poem mentioned in the text,
" The Arab's Farewell to his Steed" (D 34).
The sophisticated Dublin reader may have had further suspicions
about the scene where the two young English gentlemen flirt with the
young working girl. The gentlemen seem curiously out of place,
being neither regular patrons nor working staff, their accents signify
ing not only their social superiority but also some identification with
their compatriots, the English entrepreneurs behind the fair. Perhaps
they wish in all sincerity to invite her to join them in the fun of the
entertainments continuing elsewhere at the fair; yet if the old sexual
notoriety of the Dublin Donnybrook fair was perhaps on the minds of
the parents of Mangan's sister when they sent her on a retreat during
the very week of the Araby bazaar, then that same reputation might
have figured in the plans of the two English gentlemen who strategi
cally engage a solitary girl in flirtatious conversation just at closing
time on a Saturday night.
Of course, the boy's imagination is primed from the start to escape
from all adversity seen in the external social world into his private
realm of sexual and literary images. As a fictional character, he
belongs to the same type as the younger boy in "The Sisters," remem
bering a dream, perhaps, of Persia (D 14), the older boy in A Portrait,
who is seen "praying in an ecstasy of Oriental posture" (P 258), and
several characters in Ulysses who share thoughts of Turko the Terrible
and Haroun al Raschid.35 Such dreams of the East had long flourished
in western literature, beginning with sometimes fabulous medieval
travelers' accounts of wealth, power, and spices, inventing Araby as a
place where "reality and dream become one," outside the ordinary
boundaries of geographical, historical, and political Europe.36 In
English literature, images of Araby can be traced back to John
Milton's "Araby the blessed" and John Skelton's phoenix as the "bird
of Araby," as well as to fragrant Araby in English romantic poetry and
even " Araby's gay Haram" in Thomas Moore's popular Lalla Rookh.37
In English and French writers of the nineteenth century, Araby
became an exotic, sensual, or Utopian alternative to the West, an epit
ome of difference. But Irish writers looked to the Orient to represent
their rising cultural nationalism and their rejection of British influ
ence. For several centuries, Irish thinkers had claimed a special cul
tural relation to the ancient East, believing that the Irish language
derived not from Celtic or other European tongues but directly from
Phoenician or Hebrew and that, therefore, the Irish people were also
of ancient Middle Eastern descent (if not one of the lost tribes of
Israel).38 Just as Aeneas had come from Troy via Carthage to found
Rome, so the ancient Milesians were said to have made the epic voy

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age from Phoenicia via Scythia and Spain to Ireland. These Hebraeo
Hibernian and Phoenician myths of origin were supported in early
modern scholarly manuscripts, such as Richard Creagh's De Lingua
Hibernica and Geoffrey Keating's History of Ireland, and even in efforts
published as late as the nineteenth century, such as Francis
Crawford's learned papers on "Hebraeo-Celtic Affinities" and
Standish James O'Grady's highly influential History of Ireland.39
Significantly, by the early eighteenth century, these Oriental myths of
Irish origins had been incorporated into a distinctively Irish literary
form, the aisling, the dream-vision poem of love or nationality, in
which the poet encounters the beautiful, noble sky-maiden, the per
sona of Ireland, typically of Milesian ancestry, in an intense, myth
laden, virtuoso-style interview.40
Celtic antiquarianism, already spurred by the vogue of Ossian,41
contributed, in the next generation, to the full flowering of popular
Irish Orientalism in the widely admired poetry and parlor songs of
Moore, who had tactfully attempted to raise English consciousness of
the problems of Ireland through such works as Irish Melodies.42 Moore
subsequently exploited what has been called "the parallel fashion for
Orientalism and Celticism"43 in his sensationally successful verse tale
Lalla Rookh, in which he embedded a political plea for tolerance for
Irish Catholics: "the cause of tolerance was again my inspiring theme; and
the spirit that had spoken in the melodies of Ireland soon found itself
at home in the East."44 The popular song "Araby's Daughter," from
Lalla Rookh and set to music by George Kiallmark, went through many
editions both as a separate number and in song collections.45 Moore's
Lalla Rookh was still so well liked in the 1870s that it could be adapt
ed by Frederick Clay into a musical cantata with lyrics by William
Gorman Wills, from which came the separate number, "I'll Sing Thee
Songs of Araby," often cited as a possible direct source of the name of
the 1894 Dublin bazaar.46 The sustained vogue of Lalla Rookh in vari
ous incarnations served to define a distinctive genre of popular Irish
poetry and music as the "songs of Araby,"47 a fresh epidemic of which
was touched off by the Dublin Araby bazaar:

There must be something in the name of Araby that causes the divine
afflatus to descend upon those who study its manners and customs.
Moore's "Lallah Rookh/' with its resplendent and vivid imagery and
perfect poetry was the wonder of the age, for the Irish songster's expe
rience of the East was confined to his reading of the Arabian Nights and
Oriental literature generally. With the advent of Araby in Dublin there
has been a passion for producing Arabian poetry and music.48

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Honoring this tradition, the uncle in the story associates the mention
of Araby with Caroline Norton's sentimental poem, "The Arabs
Farewell to his Steed," which he is still reciting as the boy departs (D
34).49 Joyce often acknowledges the public fascination with Moore,
referring or alluding to him in Dubliners as a favorite author of the
"josser" in "An Encounter" (D 25, 26), the author of the song per
formed by the harpist in "Two Gallants" (D 54), and the writer of the
Irish Melodies that Gabriel thinks of in "The Dead" (D 179), the title of
which story echoes Moore's song, "O Ye Dead!" (/JII244).
Joyce also ridiculed Moore's musical strain of Irish Orientalism as
"the moore the melodest" (FW468.27-28), pretending to be sick of the
cloying popularity of Moore's Irish Melodies and Lalla Rookh in
"tummy moor's maladies" (FW 492.34) and making Rudyard
Kipling's popular Mandalay one too many in "Inglo-Andean
Medoleys from Tommany Moohr" (FW 106.08), in each instance play
ing with the Irish pronunciation of Moore as "moor." But in complete
seriousness, when it suited him, Joyce also subscribed to many of the
same Irish myths, including the belief that both the Irish language
and alphabet were "oriental in origin": "The Irish language, although
of the Indo-European family, differs from English almost as much as
the language spoken in Rome differs from that spoken in Teheran. It
has an alphabet of special characters, and a history almost three thou
sand years old" (CW 155). Citing Charles Vallancey, Joyce believed
that Irish folk speech still resembled the ancient Phoenician language
(CW 156). In the late eighteenth century, Vallancey had made the
extravagant claim that Irish was the source of most ancient languages
by interpreting the name Iran, the place where Indo-European lan
guages were said to have originated, as a variant spelling of Eiran, an
old name for Ireland.50 In Ulysses, Stephen and Bloom illustrate a vari
ation on this idea when they compare the Irish and Hebrew alphabets
(U 17.24-73). Joyce's schematic geography for Ulysses, as Michael
Seidel has shown, links the Hungarian Virags to the Gibraltar-born
Molly by building on the Irish myths that traced the original rulers of
Ireland to Milesius, a king who could claim both ancient Phoenician
and Hebrew ancestors, then to descendants who had roamed in
Scythia, the region north and east of ancient Greece, later migrating
via Spain to settle finally in Ireland,51 Joyce was so passionate in
stressing the literary affinity of Ireland and the Orient that he began
his list of modern Irish authors with the names of two distinguished
nineteenth-century translators of Oriental literature, Edward
Fitzgerald and Richard Burton, confusing the actual translator of The
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with his namesake, the Irish rebel whose
biography had been written by Tom Moore (CW 171). For Joyce, Irish
literature could not be based on European literature any more than it

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could be on English literature: "For the Irish, the dates of Luther's
Reformation and the French Revolution mean nothing" (CW 167).
By 1902, three years before undertaking the writing of "Araby" and
while he was still an undergraduate of twenty, Joyce found in writing
the essay "James Clarence Mangan" the alternative version of Irish
Orientalism upon which to build his own. Eventually, Joyce was to
rank Mangan with Dante and Henrik Ibsen, acknowledging him
among those writers he especially admired by writing a musical
accompaniment for Mangan's "Dark Rosaleen" and reciting Mangan
from memory52 Joyce would have joined William Hazlitt in con
demning Moore for turning the "wild harp of Erin into a musical
snuffbox,"53 and for just this reason in his essay Joyce took Mangan's
isolated life as the necessary antithesis of the social success of Moore's
career, embracing Mangan's primitive, compelling, and forbidding
poetry as the perfect antidote to Moore's well-polished, easily acces
sible, and universally praised verse. Joyce paid homage to Mangan as
the last of "the old Celtic bards" (CW 174), the one intense nationalist
among the Irish Orientalists, the leading Byronic poseur in Dublin
who flagrantly puzzled readers in his translations as to "whether
learning or imposture lies behind such phrases as 'from the ottoman'
or 'from the Coptic'" (CW 76). It is possible to see young Joyce being
instinctively drawn to what Robert Welch has called the final images
in Mangan's poetry of "freezing, dumbness, inarticulateness" in his
exploration of his favorite themes of "darkness, paralysis, and the
abyss."54
In his 1902 essay, Joyce also announced his discovery in Mangan of
what were to be the main underlying themes of "Araby," the noble
twin identity of "Ireland" and "Istambol" and its merger with chival
ric love in its highest manifestation in Michelangelo, Dante, and
Petrarch:

East and West meet in that personality (we know how); images inter
weave there like soft, luminous scarves and words ring like brilliant
mail, and whether the song is of Ireland or of Istambol it has the same
refrain. . . . Vittoria Colonna and Laura and Beatrice?even she upon
whose face many lives have cast that shadowy delicacy, as of one who
broods upon distant terrors and riotous dreams, and that strange still
ness before which love is silent, Mona Lisa?embody one chivalrous
idea. (OV78-79)55

Moreover, Joyce evidently found in Mangan's fictionalized autobio

graphical sketches a source for the character type of the boy in
"Araby," particularly in Mangan's claim to have suffered a childhood
so wretched that he took "refuge in books and solitude," preferring to
shut himself up in a "close room" in a state of high bliss: "I loved to

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 indulge in solitary rhapsodies, and if intruded upon on these occa
sions, I was made very unhappy"56 Joyce further seems to have
encountered in the famous "ballad episode" of Mangan's biographers
an anticipation of the basic plot situation of "Araby."57 After his
adored older sister died in childhood from a scalding incident (in
another autobiographical fragment, he writes that her father's impu
dence drives her from the house), the child Mangan immortalizes her
as a "blue-eyed cherub, her image haunting him in his dreams," and
in this juvenile variation on the aisling, she is immediately replaced in
Mangan's affections by the surrogate sister who lives next door, the
"little girl of curling sunny locks, a couple of Summers his senior."58
In this "full blown childhood romance," as Lloyd puts it (Nationalism
44), the beloved girl sends the quiveringly incapable child Mangan
out into the streets in quest of a ballad, whereupon the rain damages
his eyes.59 Several distinctive elements of the conclusion of "Araby"
are anticipated here: the beloved slightly older neighbor girl, the
identification of the girl as Mangan's surrogate sister, the juvenile
quest as a version of the chivalric mission, the ballads in the streets,
the inadequacy of the child fully to accomplish the courtly deeds that
he has undertaken, and the final damage to his eyes.
The ultimate appeal of Mangan for Joyce, as David Lloyd suggests,
is in his having made his life, or at least his own fictional accounts of
his life, into the first authentically Irish version of the myth of the
romantic hero, the Byronic self-inventing self, the wanderer and out
cast from society who savors memories of his sinful and gloomy past
(Nationalism 44). Joyce reports the lengths to which Mangan had gone
in pursuing his self-definition: when faced with the charge that his
autobiographic sketch was "wildly exaggerated and partly false,
Mangan answered, 'Maybe I dreamed it'" (CW 181). The harshest
possible external conditions of deprivation and alienation were essen
tial elements in Mangan to produce their opposite, intense visions in
the tradition of the Irish aisling. Following Mangan, Joyce stipulated
that the highest form of poetry required a double denial, first, the
negation of the usual sense of social and historical reality, and second,
the rejection of whatever seemed merely literary tradition: poetry was
therefore "always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against
actuality" (CW81). In a note, Mangan reported that, while translating
the aisling, "A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century," he
replaced the Irish ceann with its homonym, the Arabian khan:
"Identical with Irish Ceann, head or chief; but I the rather gave him
the Oriental title, as really fancying myself in one of the regions of
Araby the blest."60
But in both these largely biographical essays on Mangan, Joyce had
no choice but to follow the views of John Mitchel, Mangan's first biog

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rapher-editor, a political exile, who made Mangan into the Irish hero
who opposed the imperialism of British criticism by his own duality
between his inner and outer lives, "one well known to the Muses, the
other to the police", in tracing Mitchel's influence, Lloyd has charac
terized his goal in presenting Mangan as "explicitly the image of an
Ireland outwardly oppressed but secretly, spiritually alive"
(Nationalism 28-29, 32). For Joyce, the stories in Dubliners, similarly
intended as "the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my coun
try" (LettersI 63), drew on Mangan as a significant ally by depicting
him, as Mitchel had done, like one of those rare poets who believe
that "their artistic life should be nothing more than a true and contin
ual revelation of their spiritual life," and who, furthermore, had
rejected all ancestries and dependencies in the tenet "that the poet is
sufficient in himself" and the maker of his own patrimony (CW 184).
The boy in "Araby" knows very well that he lives in the realm of
images and the imagination when he reacts to the political songs of
the nationalistic street-singers: "These noises converged in a single
sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely
through a throng of foes" (D 31). Although he knows both chalice and
foes are unreal, the boy uses their unreality to launch his own fiction
al identity. In denying the reality of both the historical Araby fair and
the popular tradition of Irish Orientalism in "Araby," Joyce seems to
embrace the duality of the Mangan-Mitchel principle as his own rep
resentational methodology. In this light, "Araby" may be an ironic
satire on the boy's follies, but it also confronts the reader with the
rejection of their binary opposite, the representation of English and
Anglo-Irish material culture and literary tradition.61
Mangan had openly admitted the extent to which he had trans
formed Moore, and when confronted with the accusation that he had
exaggerated his knowledge of Oriental languages, he replied that his
translations were if not Moorish, then Tom-Moorish.62 Nor was
Mangan troubled by the discovery that his command of Irish was so
weak that he had to rely entirely on prose paraphrases: the final result
was so effective that he could describe himself, as Joyce would have
been delighted to learn, not so much "a singular man" as "a plural
one?a Proteus."63 Joyce, in turn, seems to be participating in
Mangan's struggle, which "mangled Moore's melodies" (FW439 09
10). Joyce's texts also sometimes "mangled" both Moore and Mangan
although there are far too many echoes and parodies of both Moore
and Mangan in Joyce's corpus to trace in full here, it is worth noticing
that in Ulysses, young Paddy Dignam visits Mangan's pork store (U
10.534), and the name Dignam almost becomes Mangan when his
deceased father's name is spelled in reverse as "mangiD" by Bloom,
who watches a typesetter redistribute the letters while he thinks of

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Hebrew (U7.206). More significantly, perhaps, Joyce creates a fiction
al historical identity for Mangan as "the most significant poet of the
modern Celtic world," a title that in reality belonged to W. B. Yeats,64
further projecting an image of Mangan's "hysterical nationalism"
(CW 186) into future Irish politics: "Mangan will be accepted by the
Irish as their national poet on the day when the conflict will be decid
ed between my native land and the foreign powers?Anglo-Saxon
and Roman Catholic, and a new civilization will arise, either indige
nous or completely foreign" (CW 179). In this passage, such a future
civilization could be both "indigenous" and "completely"foreign" for
Joyce by evoking the imagination with the appropriate "magical
name" for Irish Orientalism: "The syllables of the word Araby were
called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast
an Eastern enchantment over me" (D 32).
But the magic in "Araby" is not limited to words. One little puzzle
in the story is why Joyce fixes the time of the boy's arrival at the
bazaar at exactly 9:50 P.M., even though other events in the story are
only given approximate times. It is simply "after eight o'clock" when
Mrs. Mercer leaves and about "nine o'clock" when the uncle returns,
but it is precisely "ten minutes to ten" when the boy arrives at the
bazaar, emphasized by "the lighted dial of a clock" on the large build
ing displaying "the magical name" (D 33, 34). And why is Joyce's
expression "ten minutes to ten" used here rather than 9:50 P.M.?
Apparently "Araby" evokes magical numbers in the tradition of
Arabic ciphers, which use letters of the alphabet and individual num
bers as substitutes for each other, as in the systems of cabala and
Pythagoras. If we regard "ten" as a cipher in the Latin alphabet, we
obtain the letter "J," and for two tens we get "JJ," Joyce's initials.
Furthermore, if we visualize the position of the hour and minute
hands at exactly "ten minutes to ten" on a large outdoor clock, we
find them perfectly superimposed. At this moment, the two tens as
words, the two tens as numbers, the two clock hands as visual indi
cators, and the two "J"'s as letters are all ciphers for the doubled, mir
rored signature of Joyce.
The vectors of "Araby" take into account three dynamic contexts,
the historical Araby bazaar of 1894, the popular literary tradition of
Irish Orientalism dominated by Moore's Lalla Rookh, and the intense
life of Mangan reflected in his aisling poems and fictional autobiogra
phies. The boy is given no relative, teacher, or confidant close enough
to tell his story to, and even the first-person narrator has a slightly dif
ferent identity as the man the boy will become looking back at the boy
he was. Perhaps Mangan's sister has never really mattered to the boy
as a discrete individual, since the narrator never shares with the read
er the particular name that the boy utters in his private adoration of

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her (D 30). If there is a use of the aisling in "Araby," it is less in the
boy's fragmented images of the girl than in his gazing deeply into his
own imagination, ultimately descending from the sublimity of his lit
erary voyagings to what seems a final moral and emotional percep
tion of his vanity and pain: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself
as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with
anguish and anger" (D 35). The understandings of the boy and the
narrator finally seem to be one, the several external and internal
planes of context seem to coincide, and the Dublin reader can concur
in the boy's admission that vanity has been the cause of his youthful
infatuation, his folly of undertaking the mission of attempting to
impress the girl by buying her a keepsake, and his consequent denial
of reality through flights of imagination. But the boy's final vision
leads to no feelings of humility and remorse, as a true Bunyanesque
allegory of vanity at the fair should. On the contrary, in the inflated
rhetoric of the transformation scene at the end, we find the boy play
ing the Manganian hero one more time, alternately inventing, effac
ing, and enlarging himself, now in the Araby of his own memory. At
this mythopoetic level, "Araby" seems another fictional biography of
Mangan, the Irish Orientalist, or perhaps an early fictional autobiog
raphy of Joyce in the process of reinventing himself.

NOTES

1 Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Fiction (1943;

New York: G. S. Crofts, 1947), p. 423.
2 John Paul Riquelme, Teilerand Tale in Joyce's Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 106-08.
3 See Sheldon Brivic, The Veil of Signs: Joyce, Lacan, and Perception (Urbana:
Univ. of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 12, and Garry M. Leonard, Reading "Dubliners"
Again: A Lacanian Perspective (Syracuse Univ Press, 1993), pp. 73-94.
4 Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper (New York: Viking Press, 1958), pp.
62,61.
5 Harry Stone, "'Araby' and the Writings of James Joyce," Antioch Review,
25 (Fall 1965), 376.
6 "William G. Fall?n," in The Joyce We Knew, ed. Ulick O'Connor (Cork:
Mercier Press, 1967), pp. 47-48.
7 Peter Costello, James Joyce: The Years of Growth, 1882-1915 (West Cork:
Roberts Rinehart, 1992). Further references will be cited parenthetically in the
text.
8 Araby in Dublin Official Catalogue (Dublin: Browne & Nolan, 1894).
Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
9 See Heyward Ehrlich, "Joyce's Araby' and the 'Splendid Bazaar' of
1894," James Joyce Literary Supplement, 7 (Spring 1993), 18-20, and John Wyse
Jackson and Bernard McGinley James Joyces "Dubliners "; An Illustrated Edition

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 (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1995), p. 26.
10 Interestingly, the Irish vernacular for "fairing," faireen, suggests, in par
ticular, a present bought at a fair for a child. See Richard Wall, A Dictionary
and Glossary for the Irish Literary Revival (Gerrards Cross; Colin Smythe, 1995),
p. 67.
11 Irish Times, 14 May 1894, 4.
12 Irish Times, 23 May 1894, 6.
13 Irish Times, 13 May 1894, 6.
14 Irish Times, 4 May 1894, 4.
15 Freeman s Journal, 23 May 1894, 6; Irish Times, 23 May 1894, 6. In 1894, ?1
was equal to $5, but a century later the spending power of that money has
been estimated as equal to $20 to $50. If we calculate the average of these two
estimates at $35, the gross bazaar revenues estimated here at ?13,000 to
?18,000 would be worth approximately $455,000 to $630,000 today.
16 Irish Times, 18 May 1894, 6.
17 Irish Times, 23 May 1894, 6; Freeman's Journal, 23 May 1894, 6.
18 Irish Times, 11 May 1894, 6.
19 Irish Times, 16 May 1894, 6.
20 Thorn's Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
for the Year 1904 (Dublin: A. Thorn, 1904), p. 2052. A microfiche edition was
issued in Dublin by the Irish University Press in 1973.
21 S?amus ? Mait?, The Humours of Donnybrook: Dublin s Famous Fair and Its
Suppression (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995), p. 45; concerned about the
fair's reputation for the ruin of women, one observer is quoted in this work
as estimating that, of 40,000 women present, some 30,000 were drunk by 5:00
P.M.
22 Irish Times, 23 May 1894, 6.
23 Freeman's Journal, 23 May 1894, 6.
24 See Christiane Py and C?cile Ferenczi, La F?te forain d'autrefois: Les ann?es
1900 (Lyons: Manufacture, 1987).
25 Patrick Logan, Fair Day: The Story of Irish Fairs and Markets (Belfast:
Appleton Press, 1986), pp. 127-28.
26 See D 467-69; Don Gifford, Joyce Annotated: Notes for "Dubliners" and "A
Portrait of the Artist as Young Man," 2nd ed. (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1982), pp. 45-46; Donald Torchiana, Backgrounds for Joyce's "Dubliners"
(Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 56-62; R. B. Kershner, Joyce, Bakhtin, and
Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 46-60;
and Jackson and McGinley (p. 22).
27 Irish Times, 16 May 1894, 6.
28 For further discussion, see Suzette Henke, "James Joyce East and Middle
East: Literary Resonances of Judaism, Egyptology, and Indian Myth," Journal
of Modern Literature, 13 Only 1986), 307-19.
29 Irish Times, 16 May 1894, 6; 21 May 1894, 6.
30 Perhaps Stockholm had some special significance for these traveling
shows: the sailor in the "Eumaeus" episode of Ulysses claims to have seen
Hengler's Royal Circus there (1/16.411-13).
31 Freeman's Journal, 21 May 1894, 4.

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 32 Freeman's Journal, 19 May 1894, 5.
33 Freeman's Journal, 19 May 1894, 5.
34 Freeman's Journal, 21 May 1894, 4.
35 Such popular entertainment is deeply embedded in Ulysses as a "text of
the culture"?see Cheryl Herr, Joyce's Anatomy of Culture (Urbana: Univ. of
Illinois Press, 1986), p. 8 and passim.
36 Doroth?e Metlitski, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1977), p. 240.
37 Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (London: Longman, 1849), p. 151.
38 See Norman Vance, "Celts, Carthaginians, and constitutions: Anglo-Irish
literary relations, 1780-1820," Irish Historical Studies, 22 (March 1981), 226-27;
Joseph T. Leerssen, "On the Edge of Europe: Ireland in search of oriental
roots, 1680-1850," Comparative Criticism: An Annual Journal, 8 (1986), 94-101;
and Ira B. Nadel, Joyce and the Jews (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1989), pp.
156-62.
39 See Norman Vance, Irish Literature: A Social History (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1990), pp. 21-22, 27-28.
40 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996),
p. 318; see also Robert Welch, ed., The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature
(Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1996).
41 James Macpherson stimulated preromantic enthusiasm for old and
primitive works with his sensationally successful Fingal: An Ancient Epic
Poem in Six Books, Together with Several Other Poems (London: T. Becket and P.
A. DeHondt, 1762) and related works, supposedly translations of the writings
of the third century bard and warrior, Ossian. Widely read and imitated, the
writings enjoyed prolonged attention, and even after their exposure as
Macpherson's inventions, they continued to have an influence on Roman
ticism and the Celtic Revival.
42 Moore, Irish Melodies, 10 vols. (1808-1835; Dublin: Gill and Son, 1963)
43 See David Lloyd, "James Clarence Mangan's Oriental Translation and
the Question of Origins," Comparative Literature, 38 (Spring 1986), 33.
44 After twenty editions of Lalla Rookh, Moore added a preface in 1841 that
revealed his covert didacticism. The italics are added to make the point in
Mohammed Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters
with the Orient (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994), p. 172.
45 Lalla Rookh achieved prominence through frequent reprints, and the
widespread adaptations of various portions of the work into such forms as
parlor song, musical review, pantomime, opera-comique, ballet, oratorio, and
Oriental extravaganza kept it before the public in England, France, Germany,
Italy and elsewhere for fully seventy years. Three well-known composers
who wrote extended musical settings of Lalla Rookh were Robert Schumann,
Jacques Offenbach, and Anton Rubenstein.
46 The Frederick Clay-William Gorman Wills version of Lalla Rookh was
first produced as a cantata in London around 1877, and its popular signature
song, "I'll Sing Thee Songs of Araby," survived well into the twentieth centu
ry in the repertory of one of Joyce's favorite Irish tenors, John McCormack,
who recorded it on the Victrola label. 'Til Sing Thee Songs of Araby" may
have helped to suggest the theme of the 1894 bazaar, but I find no evidence

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 that it was ever adopted as its "theme song," as has been claimed.
47 See the Irish Times, 16 May 1894, 6.
48 Irish Times, 18 May 1894, 6
49 As Stone has pointed out (D 357-58), the theme of simony in the poem
was echoed in a famous lawsuit brought by Norton against his wife, a well
known beauty which publicized his exploitation of her to gain political
preferment. Norton's poem was also printed in a musical setting. "Araby"
was a standard nickname for a horse; an Arabian horseman was pictured on
the Araby store-window posters.
50 See Leerssen (pp. 102-08, 111-12), and Lloyd (p. 33). Perhaps Irish was
technically classified as an Oriental language because the phonetic values in
the Irish alphabet could not be directly transposed to the Roman alphabet.
51 See Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's "Ulysses," rev. ed. (New York: Knopf
Publishers, 1952), pp. 65-66, and Michael Seidel, Epic Geography: James Joyce's
"Ulysses" (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), p. 17. Joyce frequently
refers to Milesius and the Milesians (CW 159,166;P100; ?/12.1310,14.372; FW
253.35,347.09,518.07).
52 See Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, The Workshop of Daedalus
(Evanston: Northwestern Univ Press, 1965), pp. 178, 191-92, 215. Joyce
planned a deluxe edition of the Mangan essay in 1930 to compete with its
unauthorized issue by Jacob Schwartz (LettersIII 209 and n3). For further evi
dence of Joyce's interest in Mangan, see Marvin Magalaner and Richard M.
Kain, Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation (New York: New York Univ.
Press, 1956), pp. 27-30, 67, 318n.
53 William Hazlitt is quoted in Vance (p. 232).
54 Robert Welch, Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats (Gerrards Cross: Colin
Smythe, 1980), pp. 77, 84.
55 The passage is quoted and amplified in Gilbert (p. 86), and see Mary T.
Reynolds, Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press), pp. 164-65, 238-40.
56 Mangan is quoted in D. J. O'Donoghue, The Life and Writings of James
Clarence Mangan (Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes, 1897; Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1897),
pp. 6-7, 9. Joyce had heard of Mangan at meetings of Irish literary societies
(CW 76) and was also personally acquainted with O'Donoghue (LettersII77).
In Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of
Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), pp. 32-34,
49-77, Lloyd sorts out the chronology of Mangan's several fictional autobi
ographies: Mangan's earliest sketch, prepared for Father Meehan, appeared
more than three decades later in Poets and Poetry of Munster: A Selection of Irish
Songs by the Poets of the Eighteenth Century (1884; Dublin: James Duffy, 1925);
the next self-sketch to be composed was the first to be published, appearing
in The Irishman, 1 (August 1850). The John Mitchel political biography in
James Clarence Mangan, Poems with Biographical Introduction by John Mitchel
(New York: P. M. Haverty, 1859), seems to have set the tone that Joyce himself
followed. In the absence of supporting documents for Mangan's fictitious
autobiographical sketches, his later biographers took liberties in merging or
embellishing on whatever he had published. Further references to the Lloyd
text will be cited parenthetically in the text as Nationalism.

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 57 See Lloyd, in Nationalism (p. 33). The most recent biographer of Mangan
agrees in reading "Araby" as essentially "repeating the formula of Mangan's
own story"?see Ellen Shannon-Mangan, James Clarence Mangan: A Biography
(Dublin* Irish Academic Press, 1996), p 439 nil. This volume became avail
able only after my article was completed
58 John McCall, The Life of James Clarence Mangan (1882, Dublin: Carraig
Books, 1975), pp. 4-5
59 "Araby" particularly echoes the episode in Mangan's fictional autobiog
raphy that McCall's Life had mythologized into a parable of the child "knight
errant" on a dedicated "mission" (p. 5) to please his slightly older beloved. In
this episode, Mangan attempts an act of gallantry far beyond his years, and
the ill-advised quest results disastrously in eight years of near blindness, an
anticipation of the concluding image in "Araby": "my eyes burned with
anguish and anger" (D 35).
60 Jacques Chuto et al., eds., The Collected Writings of James Clarence Mangan
Poems, 1845-1847 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997), p. 455n
61 In referring to several contexts that do not support it, "Araby" follows a
curious tradition in Irish Orientalism of the self-contradicting text. Moore's
Lalla Rookh mixes genres as a long prose narrative with extensive verse inter
ludes, at times heavily supported (or is it undermined?) by running foot
notes; Mangan followed in the same spirit in the ironic notes to his supposed
translations from languages that he did not know in his "Literae Orientales"
series.
62 An ironic joining of Moore and Mangan took place when one collector
had Mangan's Irish and Other Poems (Dublin: M. H Gill, 1887) bound with
Moore's Lalla Rookh in a volume now housed in the Brigham Young
University Library.
63 Mangan is quoted in Robert Welch, A History of Verse Translation from the
Irish (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), p. 111.
64 W B. Yeats had done a good deal to promote Mangan, who was much
better known in the time of the Celtic revival than it would appear from
Joyce's essays.

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