Madam, – Gerard Hanberry (June 16th) asks us to remember the events which impelled James Joyce to leave Ireland in 1904 and cites the rejection by the publishers, Maunsel, of his manuscript for Dubliners. He suggests that the rejection was because they had ". . . been recently appointed publishers to the newly formed Catholic institution University College, Dublin".
Compared with the Protestant institution Trinity College, it may have been newly formed, but the Catholic college on Stephen’s Green, the alma mater of James Joyce, was the same institution which had Newman as its first rector in 1854 and, which, under the management of the Jesuit Order, had been known as University College, Dublin since the early 1880s. The new, non-sectarian, University College, Dublin was not established until 1908 when the old institution was incorporated as a college of the new National University of Ireland. If only Joyce had waited a few years. – Yours, etc,