Sizar's laugh

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Students who paid the fees at Cambridge and TCD were called pensioners. Some promising students whose parents could not afford the cost were admitted as sizars (occasionally spelled "sizers") in an arrangement whereby free education, room, and board were compensated with regular duties that essentially made them servants to the wealthier students. These impecunious students, of course, might be just as gifted and accomplished as their social betters. In many cases they must have been more so, since they were admitted solely on the basis of merit rather than family connections, and they knew that a university education could lift them out of the states of relative poverty in which they had been raised. Richard Westfall, a historian of science who wrote a biography of Isaac Newton––a sizar at Cambridge––shows in Never At Rest (1980) that from an early time sizars at Cambridge attained degrees at a much higher rate than did gentlemen (75).

William Kirkpatrick Magee (John Eglinton) was awarded numerous prizes at TCD. From 1887 to 1893 he won the Vice-Chancellor's prize for composition in English, Greek, and Latin four times. He won a similar prize for verse twice, and a prize for prose twice. But the fact of having been a sizar, which Joyce keenly noted and memorialized, must have marked him for life as a social inferior, and the way Joyce mentions it indicates that it has left permanent scars in his psyche. His "sizar's laugh of Trinity" in the direction of the man he reveres suggests an attitude of deference and ingratiation that he learned at school. It is surely significant that the laugh goes "unanswered" by Russell, much as the haughty children of the wealthy at Trinity would have accepted ingratiating laughs from their sizars without condescending to echo them. In a personal communication, Vincent Van Wyk observes that Eglinton's acerbic manner elsewhere in Scylla has perhaps been spawned by this disparity in privilege––an adult compensation for the humiliations of late adolescence.

In a short article "On the History of Sizarship in Trinity College," Hermathena 13 (1905): 315-18, the famous Trinity don John Pentland Mahaffy writes that "Subsizars attended on the Scholars' table, while the Sizars attended on that of the Fellows. It was a tradition up to my youth that they dined off the remains left after the Fellows' dinner, and that they rang the bell, swept the hall, and performed other menial offices. This I used to hear from my father, who was a Scholar in 1821; but I cannot remember whether he described it as existing in his day, or already obsolete" (315-16). This testimony suggests that as the 19th century wore on sizars were subjected to less humiliating treatment than before. But the indignities before were searing. Here is English historian William Howitt writing in 1847 about Oliver Goldsmith:

The family income did not allow him to occupy a higher rank than that of a sizer, or poor scholar, and this was mortifying to his sensitive mind. The sizer wears a black gown of coarse stuff without sleeves, a plain black cloth cap without a tassel, and dines at the fellows' table after they have retired. It was at that period far worse; they wore red caps to distinguish them, and were compelled to perform derogatory offices; to sweep the courts in the morning, carry up the dishes from the kitchen to the fellows' table, and wait in the hall till they had dined. No wonder that a mind like that of Goldsmith's writhed under the degradation! He has recorded his own feelings and opinions on this custom: "Sure pride itself has dictated to the fellows of our colleges the absurd fashion of being attended at meals, and on other public occasions, by those poor men who, willing to be scholars, come in upon some charitable foundation. It implies a contradiction, for men to be at once learning the liberal arts and at the same time treated as slaves; at once studying freedom and practising servitude."

How long did sizars continue to be stigmatized with red caps, like Jews with yellow stars and homosexuals with pink triangles in Hitler's Germany? Into Eglinton's time? Gone by then, but within recent memory? I do not know the answers to those questions, but the mention of Eglinton's "rufous skull" suggests an allusion to the practice. Rufous means reddish brown. According to George Moore's Hail and Farewell, Eglinton was "a thin small man with dark red hair growing stiffly over a small skull" (162). In Joyce's prose his red hair grips his head like a cap, as if his skull has been permanently marked by his experience of "practising servitude."

Some servitude is rewarded, however. Eglinton's laughing efforts to curry Russell's favor make some headway after he offers up to the oracle a demeaning joke about Aristotle: "He laughed again at the now smiling bearded face."