Discovery of the ‘Sandycove Atlas’
Joyce is famous for having been, as his biographer Richard Ellmann put it, ‘tenacious of remembered facts’.1 Ulysses in particular refracts a myriad of real events through the unsettling lenses of Joyce’s vision. Even now, more than 100 years after its publication in 1922, we are still uncovering more of the real people, places, things and events behind his portrayal of Dublin life. I believe the Sandycove Atlas could be just such a discovery, made by pure chance.
The discovery hinged on the second episode of Ulysses’, ‘Nestor’, which closely reflects Joyce’s brief career as a schoolmaster at Clifton School, in Dalkey, a seaside suburb of Dublin. Joyce is believed to have taught there for a short time in the summer term of 1904. The headmaster was Francis Irwin, remodelled for Joyce’s purposes as ‘Mr Deasy’, the Nestor figure who advises young Stephen Dedalus in sententious fashion.
Deasy is generally seen as a composite of Irwin himself and Henry Blackwood Price, an Ulsterman Joyce knew in Trieste. Joyce presents Irwin’s imperialism through the pictures and ornaments in Deasy’s study as well as his chauvinist views, while a passage where Deasy laboriously types a letter on foot-and-mouth disease for Dedalus to place in The Evening Telegraph reflects an obsession of Blackwood Price’s.
1 Ellman, p153
Despite King Pyrrhus’ efforts, Tarentum was eventually defeated. These Roman columns still stand there.
In the scene opening ‘Nestor’, Stephen Dedalus takes his pupils through a lesson on the Pyrrhic Wars, fought in southern Italy about 280BC. He begins by asking for some key facts about the Wars which he has evidently set as homework:
- ‘You, Cochrane, what city sent for him?
- Tarentum, sir.
- Very good. Well?
- There was a battle, sir.
- Very good. Where?
The boy’s blank face asked the blank window.
Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then of impatience, thud of Blake’s wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?
- I forget the place sir.
Asculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the gorescarred book.
Yes sir. And he said: Another victory like that and we are done for.’
The Pyrrhic Wars of 280-275BC started when the citizens of Tarentum called on King Pyrrhus of Epirus to help them in their struggle against Rome. The war is still memorable for giving us the phrase ‘Pyrrhic Victory’, meaning a battle won at ruinous cost.
Joyce uses the scene to foreshadow the First World War and express his views on the waste of war in general. The Boer War had recently ended and the boys were of the very age which bore the brunt of the slaughter in the Great War of 1914-18. The urge to avoid “another victory like that” was very strong.
But did this lesson really happen? Or did Joyce just invent it as a vehicle for his points about the futility of war?
In 2019, during a short holiday with my wife in Ireland, I was so fortunate as to discover a document which I believe provides strong evidence that the lesson on the Pyrrhic Wars was absolutely authenitic. What is more, this same document seems to foreshadow many other ideas and incidents in Joyce’s work. It could provide a key to some mysterious references and improve our understanding of the relationship between Joyce and his muse, Nora Barnacle, in the months of their first meeting and their courtship.
Discovery
I had Ulysses with me on the holiday and was keen to visit what is now known as Joyce’s Tower, one of the Martello Towers built along the shorelines of England and Ireland as a defence against invasion during the Napoleonic Wars. Famously, Joyce spent about a week living in the Tower in September 1904 and immortalised it as the setting for the first episode of Ulysses. Now it is an international tourist attraction in the seaside suburb of Sandycove, about a mile closer to Dublin than where Joyce taught school. Visitors can climb the steps from which ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan’ emerged onto the roof and see the same views. Inside there is furniture and other household goods which, even if they are not the ones which Joyce used when he was there, look just the same.
My wife and I talked to two of the volunteers staffing the museum. They encouraged me on my voyage with Ulysses and recommended a nearby pub, Fitzgerald’s of Sandycove. There we studied the series of stained-glass windows illustrating each episode of the novel and enjoyed a good lunch.
Right opposite the pub I noticed Eamonn’s Bookshop and took a spare moment to go inside in search of maps or atlases. At first sight it didn’t look very promising. Eamonn’s Bookshop specialises in near-new books plus CDs and DVDs. And when I asked the bookseller – Eamonn himself – if they had any maps or atlases, he said no, but then remembered a battered volume, up on a high shelf.
It turned out to be Gall and Inglis’ Imperial Globe Atlas of Modern and Ancient Geography. I bought the battered volume without hesitation because I collect atlases when they come my way, I was interested in the pre-First World War maps, and it cost only 5 euros. Then we walked back down Sandycove Road to Sandycove Station and caught the train back to Dublin.
Only as I examined this ‘Sandycove Atlas’ on the train did I start to think that it might be even more interesting than I thought. I had already noticed marks by an earlier reader on many of the plates. This was no drawback to me. I’ve been scribbling on maps since I was a small child (with indulgent parents) and I like maps which reveal something of how they have been used.
The Imperial Globe Atlas earns its title to covering ancient geography by including two historical plates right at the end; ‘The world as known to the ancients’ and ‘Italia & Graecia’. The ancient world map has no marks but coming to the very last plate in the Atlas I noticed a cluster of underlinings, in pencil, of city names in the very south of Italy. My mind clicked over to Stephen Dadalus’ history lesson. Could these be some of the towns he was asking his pupils to identify?
When we got back to our top-floor hotel room overlooking St Stephens Green in Dublin, the first thing I did was to look in Ulysses. Yes! There was Tarentum, quoted in line 2 of Nestor, and there was Asculum too!
More scrutiny of the Atlas revealed ten pencil underlines in southern Italy, and later research showed that most of them were clearly related to the Pyrrhic Wars. Tarentum was the city which asked Pyrrhus, King of Epirus for help in their struggle against the Romans, Asculum was where he defeated them in 279BC, Parthenope was one of the cities which Pyrrhus wasted, Beneventum was where the Romans eventually defeated Pyrrhus, in 275BC – and so on.
These places were not underlined at random. The only way someone would have selected these 10 obscure towns was if they were teaching, or in some way studying, the Pyrrhic Wars. As such, the marks on the Atlas bear witness to the realism of the scene at the beginning of ‘Nestor’ and, once again, to the authenticity of Joyce’s own ‘map’ of Dublin in June 1904.
Possibilities
Since that amazing day in July 2019 I have had some of the most interesting days of my life, finding further links between the Atlas and Ulysses, and even to Joyce’s other works. Lockdown, illness and simple aging have combined to slow my progress in presenting them to the world. I have not yet been able to engage Joyceans – or anyone else who enjoys a literary conundrum – with what the Atlas may have to contribute.
Now I hope the launch of this website will enable many people to study the extraordinary user marks in the Atlas and what they could imply for our understanding of Joyce’s great legacy.
Tim Johnson, August 2024