2 days ago
Epistolics Anonymous – Frank McNally on a Joycean mystery wrapped in an enigma
Further to the 'U.P.: up' mystery in Joyce's Ulysses (Diary, June 5th), there is the related puzzle of where we first meet Denis Breen: unfortunate recipient of the cryptic message who, if he wasn't demented already, has been driven so by receipt of the anonymous postcard.
He is now tramping around Dublin with two lawbooks under his oxter and on the way to see John Henry Menton about a £10,000 libel suit. But when Leopold Bloom encounters Mrs Breen, in Dublin's Westmoreland Street, her other half is in Harrison's, a confectioner's shop next door to The Irish Times.
The smell of 'hot mockturtle soup and steam of newbaked jampuffs rolypoly' emerges from the doorway, setting Bloom on another of his streamlets of consciousness, which ends with: 'Penny dinner. knife and fork chained to the table'.
That last bit seems to be a reference, not to Harrison's – or to The Irish Times canteen, as some might suspect – but to a Christian charity on Abbey Street that served free breakfasts, and did indeed imprison the cutlery lest it be considered charity too.
READ MORE
But getting back to Breen, is there any significance in his being first located here? Well, as always with James Joyce, yes. Or at least probably.
For as hardcore Joycean and regular correspondent Senan Molony again reminds me, the real-life James White Harrison who owned that confectionery shop had himself once been the recipient of anonymous mail, sent with malevolent intent.
We know this because, just as Breen intends to, Harrison went to court over it. But he had a somewhat stronger case, albeit as a mere witness rather than the plaintiff. Either way, he was sufficiently committed to it that he travelled from Dublin to Liverpool to testify.
This was back in 1883, the same year as the trials for the infamous Phoenix Park murders of Britain's chief secretary Lord Frederick Cavendish and his permanent under-secretary TH Burke.
Harrison's evidence, however, related to his having been a juror in the earlier trial of a Patrick Walsh, charged with the 'Letterfrack Murders' of a father and son in 1881, at the height of the Land War.
Walsh was hanged for that in September 1882, although not before a leading prosecution witness, Constable Kavanagh, had been shot dead outside Letterfrack Barracks.
Now, in 1883, even as the Phoenix Park Murder trials got under way, Harrison – a Presbyterian born in Scotland – and many other regular jurors received an anonymously posted envelope containing two documents.
One was an analysis of the juries that had served in 18 Fenian trials in Ireland, purporting to show that they were packed by the crown with people who could be depended on to deliver guilty verdicts.
The second document was a single-page warning, with a black border, saying: 'Woe to you if you have the goods of any of these jurors in your house, for you, as well as they, will have the blood and suffering of innocent people upon your heads'.
The letters were postmarked in Manchester but a trail from there eventually led detectives to a printing house in Liverpool, where one Michael Haines admitted producing thousands of copies for a Patrick O'Brien, late secretary of the Land League's Liverpool branch.
They and a second printer were charged with conspiracy to defeat the course of justice, and with criminal libel (the same thing Denis Breen thinks he's suffered). The printers went free eventually, after a period on remand. O'Brien served six months in prison.
Harrison's involvement in the Liverpool trial was well reported. And by his own account, he was not intimidated by the anonymous letter. 'I was not frightened, as there was nothing to be frightened about,' he said.
The case may have survived in the folk memory of 1904, and from there infiltrated Ulysses, via an incidental cameo. But it hardly helps us with the mystery of what the 'U.P.' on Breen's postcard means, or why it's been sent.
Bloom has his own suspicions: 'U.P.: up. I'll take my oath that's Alf Bergan or Richie Goulding. Wrote it for a lark in the Scotch House, I bet anything.' But just then, he passes The Irish Time and thinks. 'There might be other answers lying there.'
He goes on to admire the business acumen of those running the newspaper, who have managed to expand their advertising reach beyond the traditional ascendancy class:
'Best paper by long shots for a small ad. Got the provinces now. Cook and general, exc cuisine, housemaid kept. Wanted live man for spirit counter. Resp. girl (R.C.) wishes to hear of post in fruit or pork shop. James Carlisle made that.'
Carlyle – as he spelt his name – was the real-life managing director of The Irish Times. And among other things, he was a member of the United Presbyterians, a Scotch House of a different kind and a 'U.P.' too.
That may be neither here nor there, of course. Even so, it's as good a place as any to mention how, based on the possibility that The Irish Times might still have all the answers, the Diarist was recently interviewed by a legal podcast called The Fifth Court. It was for a Bloomsday special on the law in Ulysses. The results are now live at
