(Il)legal Deposits: Ulysses and the Copyright Libraries

Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?

James Joyce, Ulysses

Almost every aspect of the publication history of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) has been subjected to scrutiny by literary critics, bibliographers, and book historians. However, one facet of what might be termed the institutional history of Ulysses has yet to receive any scholarly attention: its accession in the closing months of 1922 into the holdings of the United Kingdom’s six copyright libraries.¹ Despite a concerted campaign by the Home Office, Post Office, Police, and Customs Authorities of Great Britain to suppress the novel, between November and December 1922 copies of the Egoist Press impression of Ulysses (published that October) were accepted and shelved under legal deposit by the British Museum, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Cambridge University Library, the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, the National Library of Wales, and Trinity College, Dublin.² This article offers a detailed account of when and how these accessions were made, and what they reveal about the marketing, circulation, and readership of Joyce’s novel in the United Kingdom prior to its availability in a mass-market edition.³

While much valuable critical work has been undertaken to problematise Joyce’s semi-ironic self-presentation as a radically autonomous figure, ‘paring his fingernails’ in divine indifference to the economic and intellectual fate of his novels, conventional accounts of the impact of censorship on the composition and dissemination of Ulysses have tended to focus on the novel’s obscene aesthetic and limited edition format as strategies to circumvent and critique the mechanisms of Anglo-American literary censorship.⁴ In such accounts little distinction is made between the legal regimes of the United Kingdom and the United States, and no suggestion is given that common ground might have existed between Joyce and the legal establishment of either nation. My aim in the present article is therefore twofold: first, to disentangle the novel’s fate in Britain from the better known saga of its American reception; secondly, to uncover the ways in which Joyce not only tolerated, but actively embraced the opportunities British copyright legislation afforded him to consolidate his novel’s status as a financially and culturally valuable artefact. In doing so, I will complicate traditional narratives of the the clash between a heroically autonomous modernist avant-garde and an equally monolithic ‘censor’ by exploring the mediating role the United Kingdom’s copyright libraries and the mechanisms of legal deposit played in such disputes. The resulting analysis will treat Britain’s copy right libraries as a distinct class of institution, operating at the vexed point of intersection between the institutions of literature, the academy, and the law. By paying attention to these institutions and to the legislative conditions which rendered the legal deposit of Ulysses in Britain not only possible but desirable for Joyce in 1922, I hope to offer a more nuanced sense of the means by which Joyce and his contemporaries sought to infiltrate (and found themselves willingly assimilated into) a crucial institutional stronghold of Britain’s dominant cultural order.

The Egoist Press ‘Ulysses’ and British Copyright

To understand the significance of the legal deposit of the Egoist Press impression of Ulysses for Joyce and his supporters, it is first necessary to offer a brief sketch of the novel’s composition and publication. Ulysses was composed by Joyce in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris between 1914 and 1922.⁵ Its first fourteen episodes appeared in serial form in Margaret Anderson’s Little Review between March 1918 and December 1920, with four episodes appearing sporadically in Harriet Shaw Weaver’s Egoist between January and December 1919.⁶ On 21 February 1921 portions of the ‘Nausicaa’ episode published in the July–August 1920 issue of the Little Review were deemed obscene by a New York Court of Special Sessions and the prospect of legally publishing Ulysses in the United States disappeared at the stroke of a gavel.⁷ Undeterred, Joyce continued to write, drastically expanding...