Tomkin-Maxwell ffrenchmullan Tomlinson

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As reflected in the Slote Annotations, Irish novelist Colm Toíbín has noticed that "Maxwell" might allude to General Sir John Grenfell Maxwell (1859-1929), who was given military command of Ireland during the Rising and instituted tribunals resulting in summary judgments and hasty executions. His position, combining high military rank with police authority, would account for Joyce's description of him as "the stern provostmarshal." A provost-marshal is a person in charge of military police, and in fact Maxwell held precisely this title in Egypt in 1884-85, when he served as a camp commandant during the Gordon Relief Expedition. His service in Egypt, Sudan, South Africa, and (starting in 1902) Ireland amply defined him as a colonial governor, the sort of man that Joyce could imagine having "blown a considerable number of sepoys from the cannonmouth without flinching"––a reference to the Sepoy Rebellion in India in the late 1850s. As for "lieutenantcolonel," Maxwell was made a brevet lieutenant colonel in 1888, a colonel in 1902, and later a general officer.

Soon after the Easter Rising began the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland declared martial law and the government in Westminster appointed Maxwell to implement it. When he arrived in Dublin on April 28 the principal rebels had already surrendered, but he gave orders to "arrest all dangerous Sinn Feiners," including ones not actively involved in the rebellion. A wide net was thrown, resulting in the detention of 3,430 men and 77 women. Trials began immediately at the Richmond Barracks, many of them held in secret, without defense attorneys or juries, and conducted by military officers who had fought against the republican rebels––all violations of longstanding legal and military procedure. Ninety people were sentenced to death and 14 were executed by firing squad at the Kilmainham Gaol in May before government officials became concerned about the hasty and secretive sentences and put a stop to the shootings. Maxwell left Ireland in 1916, never to return.

These facts richly confirm Toíbín's hunch and make straightforward sense of Joyce's decision to call the overseer of executions "Maxwell." But Slote's note also suggests a second possible historical model who was active on the other side of the rebellion. (He and his collaborators mention this woman but claim, strangely and without explanation, that the name must refer chiefly to her father.) Madeleine ffrench-Mullen (1880-1944) was an advanced nationalist and labor activist, a member of the radical women's organization Inghinidhe na hÉireann––and, incidentally, a lesbian who lived with the same female partner for 30 years. She served as a lieutenant in the Citizen's Army, working in medical tents, and was one of the 77 women imprisoned by Maxwell's forces. Her friend Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington was married to one of Joyce's university friends, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, who enters Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses as MacCann or McCann. Francis Sheehy-Skeffington did not participate in the rebellion, but British troops arrested him while he was trying to stop rioters from looting and took him to the Portobello Barracks, where he was executed without even a pretense of a trial. One may assume that Joyce knew ffrench-Mullen, or at least knew of her, through Francis Skeffington and Hanna Sheehy.

Maxwell and ffrench-Mullen are jammed together in a kind of chiastic sandwich between "Tomkin" and "Tomlinson." It seems odd that Joyce would thus combine a colonial governor ordering barely judicial killings with a republican activist threatened with such killing. But the contradiction perhaps makes some sense in context. The execution passage in Cyclops makes wild comedy out of the brutal business of British state executions, celebrating the victim as a hero while also celebrating the entire affair as a diverting spectacle staged for the entertainment of the public. (Executions around London in the 18th century often had this festive quality; perhaps some in Dublin did too.) The firing squads at the Kilmainham Gaol did their grim work without any audiences, but by pulling them into his allusive orbit Joyce manages to locate the 1916 Rising within a long tradition of violent rebellion and violent repression that Ireland had not yet, at the time of writing, seen the end of.