Cover Note: Cludach

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New Hibernia Review's covers in the 2004 volume—the year that marks the centennial of James Joyce's famous Bloomsday, or June 16, 1904, on which Ulysses occurs—will pay tribute to this literary milestone by offering a quartet of photographic images of Edwardian Dublin. We are assisted in this by the generous cooperation of Ireland's National Photographic Archive. Visitors to Ireland this year—thousands of whom will converge in the capital city in mid-June for a Joycean extravaganza—will enjoy the exhibition Dubliners, which opened in March of this year and runs through the end of August at the archive located in Meeting House Square in Dublin's Temple Bar district.

Dubliners is a photographic record of life in the city at the turn of the last century, a period immortalized in the works of Joyce. The exhibition comprises 71 photographs all taken by Dr. J. J. Clarke, a medical doctor from Castleblayney, County Monaghan who was a student at the Royal University Dublin between 1897 and 1904.

The image presented on our cover shows two dapper—and, one is tempted to say, cocky—young bravos on the steps of the National Library, probably university students. These jaunty figures immediately call to mind the scenes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when young Stephen Dedalus, standing on these same steps, offers his high-minded aesthetic theories, and Chapter 9, "Scylla and Charybdis," from Ulysses. In that chapter, Stephen is again ensconced at the National Library, discussing Hamlet with his intellectual companions until the chapter ends as Buck Mulligan arrives to mock everyone for their literary pretensions.

We thank the National Photographic Archive/An tAircív Náisiúnta Grianghrafadóireachta, and especially its curator, Sara Smyth, for its kind permission to present this delightful photograph to the readers of New Hibernia Review.