London via long sea
London
via long sea
In Brief
In Eumaeus Bloom thinks of "a longcherished plan he
meant to one day realise some Wednesday or Saturday of
travelling to London via long sea... Martin Cunningham
frequently said he would work a pass through Egan." A company
called the British and Irish Steampacket Company did take
passengers from Dublin to London, leaving every Wednesday
afternoon and Saturday evening, and a man named Alfred W. Egan
did run the company's Dublin office.
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Ulysses contains many references to the twice-daily mailboat trips between Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire) and Holyhead in Wales, which took only about two and a half hours. Just after he ponders "travelling to London via long sea," Bloom rues never having been to sea "except you call going to Holyhead which was his longest." In contrast to this quick crossing of the Irish Sea, typically followed by catching a train to London, the B&I route covered about ten times as many sea miles. Its ships steamed south from Dublin, rounded the tip of Cornwall, stopped at four ports on England's southern coast, turned north past Dover and Margate, and then came up the Thames.§ Vivien Igoe identifies Alfred William Egan as the first secretary of the B&I company from 1836 to 1867 and notes that his son Alfred W. Egan (1839-1912) succeeded him in 1870. This man, the "Egan" through whom Bloom hopes to secure a "pass" (free of charge?) was living in Sandycove when he died, according to Igoe. In a personal communication, Bill Egan, his great-grandson, tells me that he grew up in Sandycove and was taught "a family tale that the B&I boat sounded its horn when it passed Great Grandfather's home near Dalkey Island." He has found confirmation of the story in The Garden (1931) and Green Memory (1961), two books by L. A. G. Strong, a man who had no connection to the Egan family. Egan also notes that his great-great-grandfather, the elder of these two, was named William James Egan, not Alfred William.
Bloom's meditation takes place in the context of sizing up
the "bona fides" of the old yarn-spinner D. B. Murphy,
and the narration suggests that he is emulatively thinking of
himself as a would-be sailor, consistent with the Odyssean
themes of Eumaeus: "not to say that he had ever
travelled extensively to any great extent but he was at
heart a born adventurer though by a trick of fate he had
consistently remained a landlubber." Joyce thus
ironically skewers his bourgeois protagonist's pretensions to
heroic adventurousness. As the poster reproduced at the end of
this note's images proclaims, the B&I steamers were
luxurious vessels fitted with amenities proper to "holiday
sailing along the South of England coast." If Bloom ever
undertakes his fantasized "long sea" voyage, it will be
a pampered shuttle run from one UK metropolis to another, with
diverting stops in pleasant coastal towns along the way.
As for "via" and "bona fides,"
they too are thoroughly pretentious. While English prose
conventionally italicizes words borrowed from foreign
languages, that indicator is dropped for foreign terms used so
often that they become recognized parts of English vocabulary.
Slote cites the OED's evidence that the Latin word for
"road" has been used to mean "by way of," and the Latin words
for "good faith" as an expression of authenticity, since the
18th century. Along with the affected adoption of supposedly
seamanlike talk in "landlubber," the inept redundancy of
"extensively to any great extent," the cliché of "a trick of
fate," and the absurd wordiness of "consistently," the
show-off quality of italicizing "via" and "bona
fides" characterizes a narrative style that comes quite
close to the consciousness of Bloom, who throughout Eumaeus
is laboring to appear impressive in Stephen's eyes. In this
chapter free indirect style does
not merely surface from time to time amid the flow of
objective narration. It hijacks the narration, making it read
like something Bloom could have written.
