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  • The Devil Has a Dublin Accent*
  • Alison White (bio)

Nursery rhymes and tales, and the books read in childhood have fired the imaginations of the world's great writers. This is of special interest in the case of James Joyce because his mind, supremely sophisticated though it was, renewed itself ceaselessly in the popular culture: folklore, puns, jokes, cartoons, politics, music-hall, street cries, games, or theater, Punch and Judy, books for children. Joyce's Dubliners, written early in this century, is a book of stories mainly about people as obscure and as odd as the characters of Edward Lear's cartoons, and as prone to folly. Joyce wrote Dubliners in his early twenties while his childhood memories were sharp, as indeed they remained to the end. Perhaps the young author recalled books of fairy tales which came on the market in the 1890's. His family was well-off then, and its many children were well-supplied with toys, books, and free time to browse in the book shops. Joseph Jacobs' English Fairy Tales, 1892, may have drawn his ten-year-old eye. Its tales had long been current orally, as they still are, and some of them had long been in print. Jacobs' first tale, "Teeny-Tiny," was copied word for word out of Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes and Tales, published in 1848. There Halliwell had explained "Teeny-Tiny" as a cante-fable, rhymes surviving in prose. Joyce may easily have heard or read the story. I've never yet met anyone who doesn't know about the teeny tiny woman who leaves her teeny tiny house to go to the teeny tiny graveyard. There she finds a teeny tiny bone for her teeny tiny soup. Later, from her teeny tiny bed she hears a great voice call, "GIVE ME MY BONE!"

In Joyce's Dubliners there is a story "Clay," first entitled "Hallow Eve." In it a tiny old maid, Maria, a laundry worker, spends Hallowe'en with a family. There, children blindfold Maria and guide her in a divination game: to choose a ring, for marriage; a prayer book, if she is to enter a convent; water, for crossing the sea. But, Maria touches a dish of clay, the symbol of death. Later, she pathetically sings "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls" from Balfe's Bohemian Girl. . . . A sad tale's best for Hallowe'en. I never read this story without feeling that the leprechaun at Joyce's elbow led him to recall "Teeny-Tiny" and other nursery tales and rhymes as well. For he wrote that Maria "put her tiny dress-boots beside the foot of the bed." She had a "tiny, quavering voice," she "bent her tiny head"; laughing, "her minute body nearly shook itself asunder." The graveyard motif, the dish of clay, further recalls the teeny-tiny woman's ghoulish selection of a soupbone from the churchyard. And another [End Page 139] child's tale of Joyce's youth comes to mind. Maria is like a household brownie. "How can you expect Maria to crack nuts without a nutcracker?" asks her host. Aside from being an indelicate allusion to Maria's profile, where "the tip of her nose nearly touched the tip of her chin," this hints at her elfin faculties. In 1874, eight years before Joyce's birth, there was published Dinah Maria Mulock Craik's Adventures of a Brownie. Brownie had "a very little mind like his little body; but he did the best he could with it." The style is that of Joyce's story, kept ever inside Maria's limited little mind. Maria sat "on the little stool . . . with her toes barely touching the floor." Miss Mulock's Brownie "placed himself on the milking stool, which was so high that his little legs were dangling halfway down." Brownie turns a stone into a cake. It disappears. Maria buys a cake. It disappears. Like Brownie, Maria does domestic magicking. At the laundry she cut the barnbracks so well that you could not see where the knife had been. (Last January in Dublin I cut a barnbrack and, in that sticky mess, no mere mortal could have avoided leaving clumsy...

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