Contributed by Norman Beattie 14 June 1999 (revised 5/10/2000)
June 2008: Click the graphic for a new illustrated version of this article.
As some or all of you may know, June 16th is "Bloomsday", named in honour of Leopold and/or Molly Bloom, two of the principle characters in James Joyce's celebrated novel Ulysses. If you happen to get one of the legion of Joyce fanatics in your cab on June 16th, the mere mention of "Bloomsday" might just earn you an extra tip. Putting up a little sign with a "Happy Bloomsday" greeting on it might do the trick.
Of course the true Joyce fanatic will want to show off his or her knowledge of the Master and his works while simultaneously testing the extent of your own. For those of you who (like me) are not be of the elect, what follows should supply you with enough ammunition to last the length of a cab trip.
At the outset, I guess I should state my own credentials as a Ulysses expert. This is easily done: they are zilch, nada, bobkes. Not only haven't I read Ulysses all the way through, I haven't read any of it other than the parts containing the references below, and I got those by cribbing. (Hey, the book is nearly 800 pages of heavy going, and life is just too darn short.)
But this little failing on my part shouldn't discourage you. Quite the contrary. Nine-tenths of the people who affect an intimate knowledge of Ulysses haven't read any more of it than I have so, if you've got the nerve, feel free to invent your own Ulysses quotes and try them out on your passengers. It's not too likely that any of them will penetrate your facade. They'll probably be doing the same thing themselves.
For those of you want to proceed on a little firmer footing, these notes can be used as a crash course which will give you some genuine expertise on the theme of cabs and cab drivers in Ulysses. This is something that not too many Joyce fans can claim. Not even the ones who have actually read the book.
For those of you who have served time in academe and come away infected with lingering guilt about not having read Ulysses or other classics of world literature, I can also offer a rationale that works just fine for me.
Joyce, like other revered writers, spent years polishing his book with no thought of any other audience than himself and a tiny circle of literary acquaintances. He would have been surprised at the notion that a thorough knowledge of Ulysses ought to be part of the cultural baggage of every educated person.
Consequently there should be no shame in admitting that we don't have the background or understanding to appreciate his work, except maybe in isolated snippets. It ought to be enough if we accept the general verdict on his genius, acknowledge him as one of the world's great writers, and get on with our lives.
That's evidently what Joyce's otherwise devoted wife, Nora Barnacle, thought. Although she was the inspiration for Molly Bloom and a major influence on Joyce's life and work, she never concealed the fact that she hadn't read Ulysses and didn't intend to.
To put it another way, none of us feels ashamed of not visiting exotic countries that lie beyond our means or capacity or ambition to travel. We happily make do with guidebooks or brochures or the stories and pictures that more adventurous folks bring back with them and nobody thinks the less of us.
Luckily there are all sorts of people who are only too eager to tell us about their trips through Ulysses and to help us plan forays of our own. It's the work of some of these people that have enabled me to cobble together this little essay (see "Sources" at the end of this article).
For openers, here's some background to ensure that we're all on the same page. James Joyce (1882-1941) is generally conceded by those in the know to be one of the literary giants of the twentieth century. But he was no Irving Wallace. The output on which his fame rests amounts to just three novels: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses; and Finnegans Wake. Portrait is fairly straightforward compared to the other two. Ulysses is readable in spots, while Finnegans Wake, to most of us, is written in a dialect of Martian.
Ulysses was first published in 1922 (and promptly banned in the U.S. until 1933). The novel is set in Dublin during a single day in 1904 -- June 16, if you haven't already guessed -- and it records the stream-of-consciousness ruminations of Leopold, Molly, and various other characters as they ponder their own lives and react to the sights, sounds and smells of the city around them and to the people they meet along the way.
As you might expect, the narrative is packed with the jumbled impressions of daily existence in 1904 Dublin. But not content with this, Joyce also stirred in goodly helpings of Roman Catholic theology, European history, Irish legend, classical mythology and other topics, and then laced the text with multilingual puns and words from Hebrew, Latin, Gaelic and Gypsy slang. As a result the book has spawned an entire scholarly industry devoted to its study and interpretation (not to say decipherment).
The underlying structure of Ulysses is a kind of parody of Homer's epic poem The Odyssey. The Odyssey tells the story of the Greek hero Odysseus (AKA Ulysses) who, thanks to the machinations of various hostile deities, spends 19 years trying to get back to Greece following the Trojan War. Ulysses is made up of 18 "Episodes" that correspond to sections of Homer's epic, and Leopold Bloom's wanderings around Dublin parallel Odysseus's adventures on the way home from Troy. But Leopold, though decent enough in his way, cuts a very unheroic figure and Odysseus's faithful wife Penelope has a rather imperfect counterpart in Molly Bloom, who is cheerfully unfaithful to Leopold with many of his friends and acquaintances.
So much for the big picture. The essence of Ulysses from our point of view is Joyce's depiction of the cabs and cab drivers. Joyce seems to have had a certain fondness for the cab trade, judging by Leopold Bloom's musings as he passes by a cabman's shelter:
Curious the life of drifting cabbies. All weathers, all places, time or setdown, no will of their own. Voglio e non. Like to give them an odd cigarette. Sociable. Shout a few syllables as they pass. [5 223-226; see Sources (below) for an explanation of these numbers.]
Taxi drivers who value their independence and consider themselves masters of their own fate might bridle at "no will of their own", but I suspect that even they would concede a certain justice in the quotation. Bouncing from trip to trip, all drivers sooner or later feel themselves to be under the control of unseen forces acting through the medium of the dispatcher. As one of them said, it's like being a pinball in the penny arcade of life.
The phrase "time or setdown" is an example of the way Joyce peppers his text with odd words, providing an inexhaustible happy hunting ground for academics in search of topics to write about. Michael Higgins (not the TAXI-L Michael Higgins of Taxitalk fame) took a crack at explaining the phrase, pointing out that "time" in J.C. Hotten's The Slang Dictionary (1887) is defined as
cabman's slang for money. If they wish to express 9s. 9d. they say that 'it is a quarter to ten'; if 3s. 6d., half past three; if 11s. 9d., a quarter to twelve. Cab drivers exultingly say the police cannot comprehend the system.
Similarly, according to Eric Partridge's A Dictionary of the Underworld, "setdown" meant "a square meal" in British tramp slang prior to 1920. From these definitions, Higgins concludes that
'time or setdown' refers to the day to day existence of the cabmen Bloom notes as he passes their shelter; either the cabbie collects his fare (time) or he has to scrounge for a meal (setdown).... Bloom's sympathetic reaction while he passes the cabman's shelter develops both the compassionate side of his nature and the idea of the drifting cabbie as almost vagrant or tramplike.
As ingenious and plausible as this explanation is, there is a simpler one that is perhaps closer to the experience of actual cab drivers. Back in the 1700's "set down" was a hackney coach term meaning to unload passengers at the completion of a trip. "Set down" in this sense appears in the 1739 edition of Joe Miller's Jests, for example. Gradually "set down" came to mean the trip itself: "for sixpence one may have a set down, as it is called, of a mile and a half, and a tumble down into the bargain" ("Noddy" in Lexicon Balatronicum, 1811). From this we might interpret Leopold Bloom's observation to mean simply that the drifting cabbies are not only subject to all weathers and all places; they are also on call at any time for any kind of trip (setdown).
All this merely illustrates how easy it is to get into a debate on the true meaning of Joyce's text, especially when the "drifting cabbies" passage is, by Joyce's standards, pretty clear.
Bloom's meditation on the life of drifting cabbies occurs while he is passing the "hazard", which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "a cab-stand (in Ireland)". The OED says nothing about the origin of the term, but cab stands were certainly hazards to traffic since they occupied a substantial portion of the street with cabs pulling in and out and customers approaching from any direction. But then as now there were other kinds of street hazards and why the term should have attached itself specifically to cab stands is a mystery.
Bloom seems to be a bit envious of the cab horses who are oblivious to everything but the contents of their nosebags:
Mr Bloom went round the corner and passed the drooping nags of the hazard. No use thinking of it any more. Nosebag time. Wish I hadn't met that M'Coy fellow.
He came nearer and heard a crunching of gilded oats, the gently champing teeth. Their full buck eyes regarded him as he went by, amid the sweet oaten reek of horsepiss. Their Eldorado. Poor jugginses! Damn all they know or care about anything with their long noses stuck in nosebags. Too full for words. Still they get their feed all right and their doss. Gelded too: a stump of black guttapercha wagging limp between their haunches. Might be happy all the same that way. Good poor brutes they look. Still their neigh can be very irritating. [5 211]
An hour later the hazard triggers another train of thought as Bloom passes by again. Only two cabs are on the stand now, the third one having gone off somewhere with a customer:
National school. Meade's yard. The hazard. Only two there now. Nodding. Full as a tick. Too much bone in their skulls. The other trotting round with a fare. An hour ago I was passing there. The jarvies raised their hats. [6 171]
The cabs on Dublin's "hazards" were all horse cabs. Automobiles were still a rarity in 1904 Dublin:
a bed in those days was as rare as a motorcar is now. [9 801-802]
Nor is it surprising that horse cabs make so many appearances in Ulysses, since they occupied a prominent place in the street life of Dublin and other cities around the turn of the century. Before the advent of the automobile, private transportation -- apart from bicycles -- was the preserve of the wealthy. Most other people were severely limited in their means of getting from place to place. Bloom, for example, trying to determine the fastest way to a destination, has the choice of travelling
by a triple change of tram or by hailing a car or on foot through Smithfield, Constitution hill and Broadstone terminus. [10 1189- 1190]
"Hailing a car" means hailing a cab. We are accustomed to think of "car" as a modern word, synonymous with automobile, but in fact it has been in use for at least 400 years as a term for various types of horse-drawn carriages. By the end of the 19th century, however, "car" usually meant one of three things: a streetcar, railway car or, in Ireland, a strange little two-wheeled vehicle drawn by one horse.
The "jaunting car" was Dublin's predominant cab vehicle. It seems to have originated in the early 1800's as the "noddy", essentially a low-slung farm cart with seats. By the end of the century it had evolved into a charming but somewhat dangerous conveyance with two back-to-back bench seats facing out to each side. You can see a picture of an Irish car on the TAXI-L web site www.taxi-l.org/bt02-3.htm , and another on the web site of the Carriage Association of America www.caaonline.com/tour/jauntingcar.htm
Despite its small size the car could accommodate up to four passengers who sat with their legs hanging over the sides. Its ability to carry this number of people on two wheels was the chief advantage of the design. Footboards helped keep the passengers in place, and sometimes a hinged bar running across their laps served as a crude seatbelt. Nevertheless, riders were in constant danger of being thrown overboard during sharp turns. Perhaps for this reason the car never really caught on outside Ireland. Also, the fact that it was an open carriage would not have recommended it for use in colder or wetter climates.
In spite of the danger -- or maybe because of it -- the jaunting car was not without its romantic possibilities. Taking a car home after a party, Molly and one of her husband's friends manage some not so innocent flirtation on the side-seat literally behind Bloom's back:
Bloom and Chris Callinan were on one side of the car and I was with the wife [Molly] on the other. We started singing glees and duets: she was well primed with a good load of Delahunt's port under her bellyband. Every jolt the bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell's delights! She has a fine pair, God bless her.... I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time. Know what I mean? [10: 554-563]
The jaunting car was also called and Irish or Dublin car and sometimes an "outside" car (possibly because the passengers' legs hung outside the vehicle). Joyce also refers to them as "hackney cars", hackney being an old word meaning "for hire".
As with cab vehicles in other cities, the Dublin jaunting cars were licensed and numbered. Here is one of two appearances that car number 324 makes:
A hackneycar, number three hundred and twentyfour, with a gallantbuttocked mare, driven by James Barton, Harmony avenue, Donnybrook, trots past. Blazes Boylan and Lenehan sprawl swaying on the sideseats. [15 3726-3720]
The jaunting cars in Ulysses are rubber-tired, so apart from the clip-clop of the horses' hooves, the chief sound they make is the jingling of harness bells:
He eyed and saw afar on Essex bridge a gay hat riding on a jaunting car.... Jingling on supple rubbers it jaunted from the bridge to Ormond quay. [11 304-305]
In one episode Joyce uses the jingling of the harness bells as a kind of poetic shorthand for the jaunting car itself:
Jingle jingle jaunted jingling. [11 15]Jingle jaunty jingle. [11 245]
Jingle jaunted by the curb and stopped. [11 330]
Jingle a tinkle jaunted. Bloom heard a jing, a little sound. He's off. Light sob of breath Bloom sighed on the silent bluehued flowers. Jingling. He's gone. Jingle. [11 456-458]
Jingle jaunted down the quays. Blazes sprawled on bounding tyres. [11 498]
Jingle by monuments of sir John Gray, Horatio onehandled Nelson, reverend father Theobald Mathew, jaunted, as said before just now. [11 762-763]
The harness bells on the rubber-tired jaunting car were probably a safety feature designed to alert pedestrians and other drivers. When the first rubber-tired horse cabs went into service in London about 1880 they ran so silently -- at least compared to the steel tired traffic -- that people sometimes did not hear them approaching. Harness bells were introduced to remedy this problem. Similarly the first traffic bylaw passed in Winnipeg required that bells be put on carriages and sleighs during the winter months because snow on the streets tended to muffle the familiar sounds produced by vehicles and horses.
The jaunting car did not have the Dublin cab trade entirely to itself. Its advantages were lightness and speed (unless loaded down with four passengers) but it was uncomfortable to ride on, especially in cold or wet weather, and it did not have much carrying capacity for luggage. If you had a lot of luggage, or if you wanted to stay dry in the rain, or if you didn't want to risk being hurled into space on a sharp turn, you would hire the larger, slower and more comfortable four-wheeler:
But as he confidently anticipated, there was not a sign of a Jehu plying for hire anywhere to be seen except a fourwheeler, probably engaged by some fellows inside on a spree, outside the North Star Hotel and there was no symptom of its budging a quarter of an inch when Mr. Bloom, who was anything but a professional whistler, endeavoured to hail it by emitting a kind of whistle, holding his arms arched over his head, twice. [16 24-30]
In Dublin as in London, the standard way of hailing a cab was to whistle for it. If you weren't a "professional whistler" you could buy a special cab whistle for the purpose. In London, where thick fog often prevented drivers and fares from spotting each other, a cab whistle was almost a necessity. One whistle blast was the signal for a London four-wheeler, while two blasts summoned a Hansom. Presumably similar signals were used in Dublin for jaunting cars and four-wheelers.
The word "Jehu" was a jocular nickname cab drivers. It was a biblical reference, taken from the second book of Kings, chapter 9, verse 20: "the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously."
Jaunting car drivers were sometimes called "carmen" (Joyce refers once to a "carman" in Ulysses) but a more common name for them was "jarvey". This word dates back to the 17th or 18th century, when jarvey was the usual term for a London hackney coachman. The origin of the term is obscure and the explanations not very convincing. One explanation links jarvey to St. Gervais on the grounds that the good saint's symbol was a whip. Another, quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary, derives jarvey from a coachman named Jarvis who was hanged. By the 1880's "jarvey" had passed out of fashion in England and was replaced by the more familiar "cabby", but it remained popular in Ireland. Joyce uses the word twenty times or more in Ulysses; for example:
Mr Kernan turned and walked down the slope of Watling street by the corner of Guinness's visitors' waitingroom. Outside the Dublin Distillers Company's stores an outside car without fare or jarvey stood, the reins knotted to the wheel. Damn dangerous thing. Some Tipperary bosthoon endangering the lives of the citizens. Runaway horse. [10 773-777]
In calling the absent jarvey a "Tipperary bosthoon", Mr. Kernan assumes he is an untutored immigrant from County Tipperary, about 50 miles southwest of Dublin. From this it would seem that driving a jaunting car was the first rung on the employment ladder for newcomers to the big city, much as driving a taxi is in all big cities today.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "bosthoon" (meaning an awkward, tactless or senseless person) is derived from the Gaelic "bastun", a flexible whip made of green rods. The whip was both a tool and a symbol of the horse-cab trade (London cab drivers were sometimes jokingly referred to as "Knights of the Whip"). Did Joyce deliberately choose "bosthoon" because of this connection? Maybe yes, or maybe he just like the sound of the word. We'll never know for sure, but you can see how easy it is to get sucked into speculations about Joyce's use of symbolism.
Mr. Kernan's jarvey was probably risking a stiff fine or loss of his license by leaving his horse and vehicle unattended. Cab laws usually required drivers to stay close enough to their cabs to keep control of their horses and there was no provision for meal breaks or calls of nature. Because of this a tradition sprang up in London that, in moments of need, cab drivers were legally entitled to urinate against a cab wheel while parked on a stand. So many taxi drivers acted on this supposed right in recent years that the Metropolitan Police circulated a letter warning them to desist. Alan Fisher posted a copy of this letter on TAXI-L.
The cabman's shelter (which figures prominently in Ulysses) was an institution designed to provide drivers with a place to get in out of the cold and have a cheap meal without straying from the cab stand. The first shelter was erected in London in 1875 at the instigation of Sir George Armstrong, a newspaper publisher who sent his servant out one blustery January day to fetch a cab from a nearby stand. The servant was a long time returning because the drivers had all abandoned their cabs and retired to the warmth and conviviality of a local pub.
It occurred to Sir George that if the cabbies had been provided with a heated shelter on the cab stand, his servant could have found a cab a lot sooner. Sir George immediately started a building fund and got some of his friends to contribute. Not coincidentally the first shelter was located on the closest cab stand to Sir George's house.
The idea caught on and more shelters were built by the Cabmans Shelter Fund, which equipped them with kitchens and employed retired cabbies to operate them. The shelters themselves were usually small green sheds capable of seating about a dozen customers. At their peak there were over 60 of them in London. In 1986, when John Bainbridge wrote about them for Gourmet Magazine, thirteen still survived as going concerns, each with its regular clientele of cab drivers.
The cabman's shelter idea spread to other countries, including Ireland. A lengthy scene in Ulysses takes place in the shelter adjacent to the cab stand at Butt Bridge, to which Leopold Bloom brings a very drunk young man named Stephen Dedalus at one in the morning. Bloom hopes to sober Dedalus up with some food and coffee.
The shelter's proprietor is named Skin-the-Goat Fitzharris. Fitzharris's former career as driver presumably qualified him for the post; when two government officials were stabbed to death in Phoenix Park in 1881, he was rumoured to have driven the jaunting car that enabled the assassins to escape.
Like those in London, Skin-the-Goat's shelter is run under the auspices of a charitable organization but it is a self-sustaining operation catering not just to cabbies but to anyone with the price of a meal. Bloom takes a somewhat jaundiced view of this setup:
To be sure it was a legitimate object and beyond yea or nay did a world of good, shelters such as the present one they were in run on teetotal lines for vagrants at night. On the other hand.... The idea he was strongly inclined to believe, was to do good and net a profit, there being no competition to speak of. [16 790-801]
Bloom's hostility stems from Molly's experience as a piano player in an institution called the "Coffee Palace", which Dr. Thomas Barnardo invented as a non-alcoholic alternative to the "gin palaces" of London. The Coffee Palaces (there were several) provided cheap refreshments and free entertainment (music or lectures), but paid the performers miserably. Many Coffee Palaces still exist as historic buildings in Australia and elsewhere.
On the other hand the profit motive seems to have been the ticket to success as far as the cabman's shelters were concerned, at least in London. There were actually "cabman's clubs" before shelters were established but these were run by religious organizations looking for souls to save and were located in old pubs or other disused buildings remote from the cab stands. The tea was free, but the moralizing was dispensed with a heavy hand. Drivers with a sense of professional pride or self respect preferred ordinary coffee houses, "for cabmen are quite as fond of coffee as decent mechanics" said a cab driver quoted in Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round (1860):
The 'penny bank' and the 'sick fund' [operated by the clubs] may be all very well, because the member pays for all he gets, but the 'free tea' provided every Sunday afternoon always sticks in my throat. While I'm able to do my work and pay my way, I don't want anything given to me. I ain't a child. If the seven hundred members are not able to do this, they'd better say so, and either throw up driving, or get the sixpence a mile altered to eightpence."
The Cabman's Shelter Fund made no attempt to save or reform its customers beyond banning alcohol from the premises, and since they charged for meals they were not seen as charities.
The food in the Skin-the-Goat's shelter, though cheap, leaves something to be desired:
The keeper of the shelter... put a boiling, swimming cup of a choice concoction labelled coffee on the table and a rather antediluvian specimen of a bun, or so it seemed. [16 354-356]
John Bainbridge's 1986 article for Gourmet Magazine did not say much about the food in cabman's shelters, possibly because the limited menu offered little scope for comment. But the customers were evidently satisfied:
The helpings are generous, the service is fast, and everything on the plate is consumed, no doubt testifying to customer satisfaction," he wrote of the Warwick Avenue shelter. "When asked their opinion of the food, drivers customarily reply 'Not bad,' a response that, in the light of their natural reluctance to appear impressed by anything, probably translates as 'good' to 'very good.'
In earlier years the food even attracted celebrities from time to time. Sir Ernest Shackleton, the polar explorer, frequented the Hyde Park Corner shelter, and the artist John Singer Sargent (along with Grand Duke Michael of Russia) favoured the shelter near the Ritz Hotel in Picadilly Circus. The Picadilly shelter was nicknamed the "Junior Turf Club" by the aristocratic revellers who patronized it in the 1920s and smuggled in champagne despite its teetotal regulations.
Many of the London shelters were bombed out of existence during World War II, and others fell victim to street widening projects after the war. The passing of the horse cab probably put many of the other shelters out of business. The automobile and radio dispatching gave drivers much greater mobility, allowing them to stop almost anywhere for meal breaks. The cabman's shelters depended heavily (though not exclusively) on the patronage of cab drivers, and this diminished as the drivers became less dependent on cab stands for their fares.
The section of Ulysses that takes place in Skin-the-Goat's shelter is fraught with significance for Joyce scholars, who debate its symbolic role in the book as a whole. For the rest of us it is rather disappointing. Joyce's jarvies don't talk shop, so they tell us next to nothing about the 1904 Dublin cab trade. The one exception is a news item which one of them reads aloud:
The cabby read out of the paper he had got hold of that the former viceroy, earl Cadogan, had presided at the cabdrivers' association dinner in London somewhere. Silence with a yawn or two accompanied this thrilling announcement. [16 1162-1665]
This turns out to be a real news item, although it did not appear in the Dublin Evening Telegraph until June 27, 1904, ten days after the scene in the cabman's shelter. George Henry Cadogan, the fifth earl, was lord-lieutenant of Ireland from 1895 to 1902, and he presided over a dinner of the Cabdrivers' Benevolent Association. In the opinion of Vance Thompson the CBA was among the best of the philanthropic organizations devoted to the interest of cab drivers:
The cabman who becomes a member pays in an annual subscription of five shillings. When old or disabled he receives an annuity of twenty pounds a year; at least twelve annuitants are yearly chosen by vote of the members. Among those elected this year were our friends Knock Softly, who had driven a cab for forty-three years, Crimea Sailor Jack, who retires at seventy-one after forty-five years on the box and Little Hill of Westbourne Park and Davis Street, who had driven nearly half a century.
Ulysses ends with one-sentence soliloquy by Molly Bloom which is 46 pages long. This is possibly longest sentence ever published in a book intended for reading and therefore qualifies as a major literary tourist attraction. However, from the cab trade point of view the interest pretty much fades out in Episode 16 when Bloom and Dedalus leave the cabman's shelter. Molly says almost nothing about cabs.
Ironically, for one who inspired so much critical attention and the publication of so many scholarly books and articles, Joyce himself did not earn a penny from his writings until late in life. For most of his writing career he made his living as an English teacher in Italy, Switzerland and elsewhere. People only began to take notice of him in the U.S. when Ulysses was banned, and even more so in 1933 when the ban was overturned in a landmark obscenity trial.
Joyce remained relatively unaffected by fame. When one of his smarmier acolytes asked if he could kiss the hand the wrote Ulysses, Joyce replied "No, it did a lot of other things too."
Bainbridge, John. "A Gentleman's Shelter," Gourmet Magazine, August, 1986, pp. 26-30; 93-94.
Harry Blamires. The Bloomsday Book (London: Methuen, 1966). This book contains nice potted summaries of the Ulysses episodes, but it extends to over 250 pages so it's no fast read.
"Cab!" in All the Year Round ("conducted by Charles Dickens"), February 25, 1860, pp. 414-416. See www.taxi-l.org/dickens.htm for the full text.
G. N. Georgano. A History of the London Taxicab (New York: Drake Publishers, 1973), pp. 37-39.
Don Gifford (with Robert J. Seidman). Notes for Joyce: An Annotation of James Joyce's Ulysses. New York, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1974. Over 550 pages of notes take us through Ulysses line by line (keyed to the Modern Library editions of 1934 and 1961). Several maps are included, so you can trace Bloom's footsteps through Dublin.
Michael Higgins. "A Note on 'Time or Setdown' in Ulysses," Notes and Queries 36.234.2 (June, 1989), pp. 200-201.
howth.engl.uni-koeln.de [Web site containing a concordance (key-word index) at the University of Koln (Cologne), Germany.] This is a really neat toy if you want to find out, for example, if Joyce mentions golf or hockey in Ulysses (he does). The search engine brings up the word in a paragraph of context, and a link takes you to the full text if you want to go there. The concordance is keyed to the Gabler edition, cited below. Line references are given for both manuscript versions in Gabler.
James Joyce. Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, prepared by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1986. (Three volumes, with draft and final versions of the manuscript alternating on even and odd pages. The references in square brackets refer to the episode and line numbers of the final version (odd pages); for example, [5 223-226] is episode 5, lines 223-226.
Lexicon Balatronicum. London: 1811. Reprinted under the title 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (Chicago: Follett, 1971).
Vance Thompson. "The London Cabby," Outing, vol. 45 (1904) p. 151-160. (See histry01.htm for full text.)
Weldon Thornton. Allusions in Ulysses: An annotated List (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961, 1968). Over 500 pages of notes following Ulysses line by line. Similar in intent to Notes for Joyce (above) and another great source for cribbing.
Philip Warren. The History of the London Cab Trade From 1600 to the Present Day (London: Taxi Trade Promotions, 1995), pp. 119- 120.
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