Bedford Row

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Since talking with Almidano Artifoni in section 6, Stephen has walked north along Westmoreland Street and then west on Fleet Street to arrive at a "webbed window" behind which a "lapidary," later referred to as "Old Russell," is working on a jewelled chain. Thom's 1904 directory notes that Thomas Russell, "lapidary and gem cutter," had a shop at 57 Fleet Street. The shop stood next to "the powerhouse" at 49-56 Fleet Street, whose loud noises urge Stephen "to be on." After some metaphysical reveries prompted by the humming dynamos he turns north and goes "down Bedford row." On this very short street that runs north to Aston Quay he passes a clockmaker's shop, then comes across a "slanted bookcart" on the sidewalk and stops to peruse some volumes.

As Stephen dives into a strange book, someone asks "What are you doing here, Stephen?" and he recognizes his sister Dilly's "high shoulders and shabby dress." In section 11 she was standing in front of Dillon's auction house, just across the Liffey, but now she has evidently crossed the O'Connell Bridge in search of a book. Stephen tries to hide what he is reading ("Shut the book quick. Don't let see"), but she too feels vulnerable ("— I bought it from the other cart for a penny, Dilly said, laughing nervously. Is it any good?"). The encounter yields not just mutual embarrassment but heartbreaking pathos. Stephen sees a kindred spirit in Dilly, who is uneducated but hungry to learn. She has spent one of the two pennies she got from her father on a book to feed her intellectual dreams, rather than her sisters' stomachs. With agony and guilt Stephen sees that she is "drowning," but he is terrified that if he tries to rescue her he too will go down. He advises her to hide the book from her sisters but gives her no money, even though he has enough to waste on drinks and on the despicable Corley.

Early in this section, an interpolation takes readers to a scene far to the southeast: "Two old women fresh from their whiff of the briny trudged through Irishtown along London bridge road, one with a sanded tired umbrella, one with a midwife's bag in which eleven cockles rolled." These women that Stephen saw coming onto Sandymount Strand in Proteus have walked north into Irishtown and are now moving west toward the center of town. The narrative reveals that their large bag does not in fact contain (dramatically) "A misbirth with a trailing navelcord" but (prosaically) "eleven cockles"––they were out clamming. In the penultimate sentence of section 19, they cross paths with the viceregal cavalcade at the intersection of Northumberland Road and Haddington Road, and the little bivalves roll over (comically) in the bag "to view with wonder the lord mayor and lady mayoress."

The two old women from Proteus thus become actors in the pedestrian choreography of Wandering Rocks, their journey back from the beach linked to the story of the cavalcade in section 19. But the interpolation in section 13 also ties them to Stephen, and indeed it seems to be conjured by his thoughts. Just prior to the intruding sentence he has compared himself to Russell the jeweller: "And you who wrest old images from the burial earth? The brainsick words of sophists: Antisthenes. A lore of drugs. Orient and immortal wheat standing from everlasting to everlasting." As Clive Hart notes (Critical Essays, 211-12), in Proteus Stephen recalled Thomas Traherne's famous words about childhood vision ("Orient and immortal wheat...") just after seeing the women on the beach and thinking about the umbilical cord in their bag. In Wandering Rocks the order is reversed: Traherne's words call up the two women.

The section's second interpolation comes just after Stephen looks at the bookseller's cart and thinks, "I might find here one of my pawned schoolprizes." The thought seems to conjure the Jesuit priest who got him into Belvedere College where he won all those prizes: "Father Conmee, having read his little hours, walked through the hamlet of Donnycarney, murmuring vespers." Father Conmee has appeared in interpolations in section 2 and in section 4. Here he is seen in the suburb of Donnycarney, nearing his destination in Artane. But this jump-cut, like that involving the old women, is unusual, as it seems to pop like a genie out of Stephen's head. Is Joyce calling attention to his persona's status as epiphanic artist-to-be?