Essay: Joyce's interest in law is reflected in Ulysses, an unexplored aspect of the book, writes Supreme Court Judge Adrian Hardiman as Bloomsday approaches.
As a young man James Joyce was repeatedly urged by his father, the wayward but devoted John Stanislaus Joyce, to become a barrister. Joyce attended some law lectures but preferred to follow his father's own example by enrolling as a medical student, and also by dropping out in short order. The long-term plan in each case was the same: to finance a literary life by dramatic early success in a conventional profession. This was soon abandoned. But the law remained a major interest of Joyce - dry technicalities as well as high-profile crimes. In Ulysses there are 35 named lawyers, more than 30 cases and innumerable legal references, mostly to contemporary trials and legal issues. The start of this interest can be traced to Joyce's youth.
In October 1899 Joyce, a 17-year-old undergraduate in the Jesuit University on St Stephen's Green, took time off to attend a murder trial in Dublin's Green Street Court. This was the trial of Samuel Childs for the murder of his brother Thomas, a wealthy old man who lived in Bengal Terrace, beside Glasnevin Cemetery. Joyce never forgot the murder or the trial which, together with the eloquence of one of the defence counsel, Seymour Bushe QC, feature largely in Ulysses. Not least of the attractions of the case to Joyce was that Childs was acquitted, though his innocence was by no means established, that the Dublin Metropolitan Police dramatically mismanaged their case, and that Bushe, scion of two of the great Protestant legal families of Ireland, was dogged by a personal scandal that marred his career. All these aspects figure in the novel.
1904, the year of the book's action, was the height of what George Orwell called "the golden age of English murder". Ireland provided some fine specimens as well. Family doctors, respectable housewives, solicitors and even an out-of-work accountant such as Samuel Childs often figured in murders of this era, and arsenic was a weapon of choice.
There cannot often have been so middle-class a murder trial in Green Street as that of Samuel Childs - Joyce liked gentility, faded or otherwise, in his characters. The Childs brothers' father had been carver and gilder to the lord lieutenant and the deceased brother, whose will featured largely at the trial, had been a well-known Church of Ireland clergyman of literary interests. But Thomas was beaten to death with his own fire irons.
Other murders are noted in Ulysses. The case of Mrs Florence Maybrick, convicted of the murder of her husband by arsenic, is cynically discussed by Molly Bloom in her soliloquy that ends the book. Mrs Bloom is not one of those who doubts Mrs Maybrick's guilt but is glad on principle that the authorities weren't so gross as to hang a woman.
The Childs case is the most fully described in Ulysses, but more deeply embedded in the novel is the case of Constable Henry Flower, a Dublin policeman who in 1900 was charged with the murder of a "slavey" or housemaid, Bridget Gannon, by drowning her in the river Dodder just beside Lansdowne Road rugby ground. There was a very strong case against Flower, but it was thrown out by the Grand Jury after the judge hinted broadly that the drowning might well have been accidental. Though this seems very strange to a contemporary lawyer, Flower may have been innocent after all: 40 years later an old woman dying in a Dublin tenement confessed that she had killed Bridget Gannon and set up Henry Flower, according to the Dublin Joycean John Garvin.
IN THE NOVEL, Flower is a sort of alter ego of the hero, Leopold Bloom. Bloom's father was a Jewish immigrant and his original surname, Virag, means Flower. Bloom conducts his highly suggestive correspondence with the typist Martha Clifford under the pseudonym Henry Flower. Wordplay on these names and Bloom's own name recurs in the book. Flower's story chimes with Joyce's own rather jaundiced view of the police, which seems to have been common in the Dublin of the day: "Was she in the habit of walking with policemen?" a friend of the dead woman was asked by the coroner.
Elsewhere in Ulysses the self-styled "great Irish detective", Assistant Commissioner John Mallon, who trapped the Invincibles, is depicted giving a timely hint to a well-connected citizen that he should leave town to avoid being charged under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1882. The Act is that under which Oscar Wilde was convicted.
Unlike many writers, Joyce understood that the tragedies and dramas of life are reflected in civil as well as criminal cases. The Wandering Rocks chapter shows various citizens of Dublin going about their business or filling their leisure time on the first Bloomsday: one is an old lady who visits the Four Courts and hears portions of three real-life cases. One of these was reported in the official Law Reports the following year: Harvey v Ocean Accident and Guarantee Corporation (1905) 2 IR 1. Charles Harvey, the secretary of the Cork Yacht Club at Queenstown (Cobh) was found dead in the river Lee west of Cork city. His life was insured with the defendant, but the policy excluded suicide. When it was discovered that he had "borrowed" some of the club's money, the company refused to pay on the policy, pleading suicide. His relatives claimed, and the judges of the Court of Appeal found, that there was a legal presumption against suicide, which required clear evidence to displace it. Lord Justice Holmes somewhat crudely said "I know of no place affording better facilities for drowning than from Queenstown seaward: and why a man residing there should go to the City of Cork and some distance beyond it to look for water is a mystery".
Joyce, like Trollope, was very interested in the financial manoeuvres of those just clinging to respectability. Characters in Ulysses highly praise Sir Frederick Falkiner, Recorder of Dublin from 1876 to 1905, because he has no time for money-lenders. It is no coincidence that the usurer he denounces, Reuben J Dodd, was in real life a voracious creditor of Joyce's father. Again Paddy Dignan, buried on Bloomsday morning, turns out to have mortgaged his life insurance policy without telling the insurer: Bloom knows all about the law applicable to such a desperate measure and bewilders the drinkers in Barney Kiernan's pub with a lecture on the Policies of Assurance Act, 1867.
Bloom was startled by another action tried in Dublin on June 16th, 1904, Delaney v Bourke, in which a Kilkenny girl sued a Revenue official for breach of promise of marriage. Both were members of the Gaelic League: "Love making in Irish," said the Evening Telegraph, "two hundred pounds damages." Having read the report, Bloom tries to disguise his handwriting in his reply to Martha Clifford. In the Eumaeus chapter, Bloom is preoccupied with the Parnell divorce trial and the shaming publicity it attracted. "Why does it matter more now?" the tragic Mrs O'Shea asked Parnell. "They have all known about it for years." But the topic is an uncomfortable one for Bloom, who that very day is playing the cuckold O'Shea to Blazes Boylan's Parnell and Molly's Katharine O'Shea.
THE NUMBER OF legal characters in Ulysses is rarely remarked on. There are, at least, 11 judges, 13 barristers, 11 named solicitors and more unnamed, two taxing masters, a coroner and his clerk, a cost accountant, a master in chancery and a struck-off solicitor. Most are real-life contemporaries of Joyce. They range from the rich and successful - Timothy Michael Healy KC, MP and John Henry Menton, Solicitor - to the archetypal broken-down barrister JJ O'Molloy pawning his watch under a false name on Francis Street, and the struck-off solicitor O'Callaghan selling boot laces on Sackville Street.
Ulysses achieves universality while being totally rooted in a specific time and place - Dublin, June 16th, 1904. The legal references illustrate this: the Childs case in Ulysses might be seen as an essay on fratricide, on the unknowability of past events or on the power of eloquence. But it is also, and primarily, a real event, a presence in the minds of Dubliners in 1904 and an excellent example of a botched prosecution. To read the very full contemporary newspaper account of the trial confirms Joyce's view of the case as one where circumstantial evidence collapsed: the locked and barred house turned out to have an open door, the impoverished brother turned out to be a creditor of his wealthy sibling and the prosecution were caught suppressing documents suggesting the possibility of an opportunistic robbery.
Only in one respect was Joyce wrong: the brunt of the defence was borne by Tim Healy and not by Seymour Bushe. But Joyce hated Healy for his role in the downfall of Parnell and gave him no credit. Many characters praise Bushe's eloquence as instrumental in the acquittal. But there is a sting in the tail: a suggestion that Bushe had a skeleton in his cupboard that prevented his further advancement. This was true: back in 1886 Seymour Bushe had married Kathleen Maude, daughter of Lord Montalt, after she had been divorced by her first husband for "open and criminal adultery" with him, Bushe. It was this that kept him off the Bench. Joyce, it seems, never forgot anything he heard.
LAW IS ONLY one of the subjects that Joyce treats with a knowledgeable and sometimes quite technical familiarity. Medicine, politics, music and religion are among the others. The medical allusions have been the subject of two books by Dr JB Lyons; the legal ones are largely unexplored.
A little legal knowledge and background illuminates many passages of Ulysses. The book returns the compliment by rescuing from oblivion some Irish lawyers of a century ago. It is the fate of judges and lawyers to pass into obscurity, apart from bloodless references in compilations of professional interest. In Ulysses some of them flicker briefly to life again as real people who walked around Dublin in June 1904. Interesting people too: Ned Lambert in the book is waiting for his uncle, Hedges Eyre Chatterton, Vice Chancellor of Ireland, to die and leave him wealthy. The old man surprised him by marrying at the age of 85. And Mr Justice William Kenny, who tried Samuel Childs, was an upright judge but a Castle Catholic of so deep a dye that, according to a contemporary, "he would have given anything - except his immortal soul - to be a Protestant".