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Invincible Joyce: The Phoenix Park murders in Ulysses

The chapter on the killings reflects Joyce’s fascination with the notion of betrayal, personal and political

The 1882 assassination of English statesman Lord Frederick Charles Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke, the permanent Irish under secretary, in Dublin by a group calling themselves the Invincibles. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Daniel Mulhall
Wed Jan 12 2022 - 06:00

There is more Irish political history in Ulysses than you might imagine, given the novel’s reputation for occupying literature’s loftiest aesthetic ground. James Joyce took a forensic interest in the affairs of the country he left behind in 1904 and through the pages of his novel there are multiple sightings of, and references to, public figures from early 20th-century Ireland.

Perhaps the most intriguing real-life character in Joyce’s novel is someone we encounter in the cabman’s shelter near Butt Bridge, where the bulk of the Eumaeus episode of Ulysses, the novel’s 16th chapter, is set. When Bloom and Stephen Dedalus arrive at the shelter following their misadventures at Bella Cohen’s establishment in Dublin’s night-town, we learn that its keeper “is said to be the once-famous James ‘Skin-the-Goat’ Fitzharris, the invincible”. Given that everyone in Ulysses appears to know everything about everyone else in the city, it is strange that there should be any doubt about the identity of someone as notorious as Skin-the-Goat. However, the finicky narrator of this episode seems uncertain about almost everything.

Brutally killed

Fitzharris was a member of the Invincibles, who were an offshoot of the Fenian movement. In what was probably the most grievous blow to the British administration in all of the 19th century, the group brutally killed both the chief secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his under secretary, Thomas Burke, in Phoenix Park. Cavendish, a relative of Gladstone by marriage, had just arrived in Dublin with a conciliatory mission. The pair were set upon by their assailants as they walked back from Dublin Castle. Five Invincibles were subsequently executed, while the group’s leader, James Carey, became an informer and was killed while on his way to a new life in South Africa. Skin-the-Goat, who drove the getaway car, spent 16 years in prison and was released in the late 1890s.

The Phoenix Park murders run through the pages of Ulysses. When Bloom visits a church in the Lotus Eaters episode, he recalls with puzzlement that Carey had worshipped there while he was plotting to kill the chief secretary. This feeds Bloom’s sceptical instincts about religion as he muses that “there’s always something shifty” about what he calls “crawthumpers”. “They’re not straight men of business either,” adds a businesslike Bloom.

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In the Aeolus episode, Myles Crawford, the overbearing editor of the Evening Telegraph, credits Ignatius Gallaher with the newspaper scoop of the century when he dispatches a special report detailing the Phoenix Park murders for the New York Post. In the Cyclops episode, the execution of the Invincible Joe Brady is recalled.

Why would an event that had occurred more than three decades prior to when Joyce sat down to write Ulysses resonate so strongly in his novel? It has, of course, something to do with Joyce’s fascination with the notion of betrayal, personal and political. And what better example than that of James Carey turning on his accomplices. This focus on the Invincibles also reflects Joyce’s interest in the intriguing intersection between parliamentary nationalism and Fenianism, derived as so many things in Ulysses are from the persona of Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce.

Infatuated

As a young man, Joyce senior had dabbled with the Fenians before becoming infatuated with Parnell. His son, who inherited this Parnellite enthusiasm, understood that there was not always a hard and fast divide between the moderate parliamentarians and the more resolute separatists, and that Parnell had deftly exploited this fuzziness. Writing in a Trieste newspaper in 1912, Joyce astutely observed that Parnell had “set out on a march along the borders of insurrection”.

The Phoenix Park murders represented a crude, frontal assault on Parnellism, designed to derail an emerging alliance with Gladstone's Liberal Party

Ulysses is set in 1904, halfway between the death of Parnell in 1891 and the Easter Rising of 1916, and depicts a society on the cusp of political change. I see Joyce’s work, among many other things, as an elegy for the fading Parnellite world of his father’s generation. John Joyce’s life went downhill after the eclipse of his political chief, Parnell, and Simon Dedalus’s sourness in Ulysses seems to me to be an echo of the dashed expectations of the Parnellite era.

In an essay on Fenianism published in 1907, Joyce wrote about the competition between the moderate parliamentarians and the physical force tradition. The Phoenix Park murders represented a crude, frontal assault on Parnellism, designed to derail an emerging alliance with Gladstone’s Liberal Party. Ironically, as Conor Cruise O’Brien pointed out in his study of Parnell’s party, the murders actually served to strengthen the hand of the constitutional politicians and their charismatic leader.

Advanced nationalism

Joyce saw the “ourselves alone” party, Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin, as the “latest form of Fenianism” and perhaps “the most formidable”. This means that, at a time when few others rated it, Joyce spotted the potential of Griffith’s version of advanced nationalism, which came into its own a decade later.

At the cabman’s shelter, Skin-the-Goat insists that Ireland is “the richest country in the world bar none on the face of God’s earth, far and away superior to England”. There would be, he predicted, “a day of reckoning” in store “for mighty England”. He asserts that the Boer War (1899-1902), which stirred up anti-imperialist sentiment in Ireland and elsewhere, had been “the beginning of the end” for the British Empire and that Ireland would be England’s Achilles’ heel. Those forewarnings came to pass while Joyce was busy writing his novel in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, during and after the first World War, and at the time of the Easter Rising when the heirs to the Fenians sought to exploit England’s wartime vulnerability.

‘Egregious balderdash’

Bloom, a man of pragmatic instincts, is inclined “to poohpooh” Skin-the-Goat’s arguments as “egregious balderdash”. Ever the moderate, he argues that: “A revolution must come on the due instalments plan.” He does, however, acknowledge “a certain kind of admiration” for someone who had brandished “cold steel, with the courage of his political convictions”, but he “disliked those careers of wrongdoing and crime on principle” and “personally he would never be party to any such thing”. Thus, Bloom comes across as an invincible constitutional nationalist from the ambiguous school of Charles Stewart Parnell, and with a fondness for Arthur Griffith, whom he saw as a “coming man”. By the time Ulysses was published on February 2nd, 1922, Griffith, then president of Dáil Éireann, was someone whose day had truly come.

Daniel Mulhall is Ambassador to Washington and the author of Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey (New Island Books).