This document provides summaries and context for references and allusions in James Joyce's Ulysses. It includes explanations of characters, locations, historical figures, religious concepts, and quotes referenced in different lines and passages from the text. The summaries identify people, places, events, philosophical ideas, and works of literature alluded to in Ulysses.
2. “A bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed”
(1.2)
• The bowl will become the chalice in the mockery of the Mass in the scene
that follows.
• The razor is the sign of the slaughterer, the priest as butcher.
3. “Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest.”
(1.9)
• A raised circular platform in the center of the tower’s flat roof, once used as
a swivel-gun mount.
4. “He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower…” (1.9-
10)
• Dublin / Wicklow
5. “Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls.” (1.41)
• Malachi is the prophet (c. 460 B.C.) of the second coming of “Elijah the
prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.”
7. “Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother?” (1.77-
78)
• Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), in “The Triumph of Time” (1866).
8. “… on the mailboat clearing the harbourmouth of Kingstown.”
(1.83-84)
• Kingstown Harbor, an artificial harbor on the southern shore of Dublin Bay,
is approximately one mile northwest of the tower at Sandycove
9. “How are the secondhand breeks?” (1.113)
• Slang for trousers.
10. “That fellow I was with in the Ship last night…” (1.127)
• A hotel and tavern at 5 Abbey Street Lower, in the northeast quadrant of
Dublin not far from the Liffey.
11. “He’s up in Dottyville…” (1.128)
• A mocking name for the Richmond Lunatic Asylum, which with its attached
farm was located in the northwest quadrant of Dublin.
12. “I pinched it out of the skivvy’s room…” (1.138)
• As a slavey, a maid of all work.
13. “And her name is Ursula.” (1.140)
• An early Christian saint whose legendary career involved the abhorrence of
marriage.
14. “The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror…”
(1.143)
• Paraphrased from the preface (a prose poem) to Oscar Wilde’s (1854-1900)
novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).
15. “Hellenise it.” (1.158)
• The verb to Hellenise was coined by Matthew Arnold (1822-88) in his
attempt to distinguish what he regarded as the two dominant impulses of
Western culture.
16. “Break the news to her gently, Aubrey!” (1.167)
• After an American popular song, “Break the News to Mother” (1897), by
Charles K. Harris.
• http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/id/6167/
17. “They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay
on the water like the snout of a sleeping whale.” (1.181-82)
• The headland that rises abruptly 791 feet above the shoreline approximately
seven miles south of, but not visible from, the tower at Sandycove.
18. “I remember only ideas and sensations.” (1.192-93)
• This proposition echoes the essentially mechanistic concept of the human
psyche developed by the English philosopher David Hartley (1705-57) and
derived from the work of John Locke (1632-1704) and Sir Isaac Newton
(1642-1727).
19. “I see them pop off every day in the Mater and Richmond and
cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom.” (1.205-6)
• The Mater Misericordiae Hospital in Eccles Street, the largest hospital in
Dublin. (Pictured on the right)
• The Richmond Lunatic Asylum was associated with the Mater Misericordiae
in the treatment of poverty cases.
20. “Chuck Loyola, Kinch, and come on down.” (1.231-32)
• St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), founder of the Society of Jesus and
noted for the militancy of his dedication to religious obedience, not only in
outward behavior but also obedience of the will.
21. “And no more turn aside and brood, Upon love’s bitter
mystery, For Fergus rules the brazen cars.” (1.239-41)
• Lines 7-9 of W.B. Yeats’s “Who Goes with Fergus?” (Collected Poems) the
poem was included as a song in the first version of Yeats’s play The
Countess Cathleen (1892).
22. “She heard old Royce sing in the pantomime of Turko the
Terrible and laughed with others when he sang.” (1.257-58)
• Edward William Royce (1841-?), an English comic actor famous for his roles
in pantomimes.
• Turko the Terrible (1873) a pantomime by the Irish author-editor Edwin
Hamilton (1849-1919), adapted from William Brough’s (1826-70) London
pantomime Turko the Terrible.
23. “Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys.” (1.265)
• What the English Theosophist Alfred Percy Sinnett (1840-1921), in The
Growth of the Soul (London, 1896), called the Theosophical concept of a
universal memory in which all moments and thoughts are stored.
24. “So I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes.” (1.311)
• Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit school for boys, regarded as the most
fashionable Catholic school in Ireland.
25. “When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said.”
(1.357)
• Appears as a character in an anonymous Irish song, “Ned Grogan.”
26. “…or is it in the Upanishads?” (1.371)
• Hindu: the name of a class of Vedic works devoted to theological and
philosophical speculations on the nature of the world and man – associated
here with the Theosophical interests of Yeats and other Irish intellectuals.
27. “Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her in old
times.” (1.403)
• Two traditional epithets for Ireland. “Silk of the kine” (the most beautiful of
cattle; allegorically, Ireland) is a translation of the Irish phrase shioda na
mbo, from an old Irish song, “Druimin Domm Dilis”.
28. “Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty.”
(1.467-68)
• After words attributed to Lord Nelson (“England expects…”) at the battle of
Trafalgar (1805) and part of the refrain from “The Death of Nelson.”
29. “…that I have to visit your national library today.” (1.469-70)
• The National Library of Ireland, founded in 1877. The nucleus of its books
was donated by the Royal Dublin Society.
30. “Agenbite of inwit.” (1.481)
• Middle English: “remorse of conscience.” Ayenbite of Inwyt (1340) is a
medieval manual of virtues an vices, intended to remind the layman of the
hierarchy of sins and the distinctions among them.
31. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.”
(1.517)
• From Walt Whitman’s (1819-92) “Song of Myself” (1855, 1891-92), section
51, lines 6-7.
32. “Stephen, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed
them out…” (1.528)
• An inexpensive walking stick made out of the unbarked sapling of an ash
tree. In Celtic tradition the ash was associated with kingmaking and “half
the furniture of arms.”
33. “Martello you call it?” (1.542)
• After Cape Martello in Corsica, where in 1794 the British had great trouble
making a similar tower.
34. “When the French were on the sea.” (1.543-44)
• From a late-eighteenth-century Irish ballad, “The Shan Van Vocht” (The
Poor Old Woman; i.e., Ireland herself).
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PDeWkmY4U8
35. “I’m not equal to Thomas Aquinas…” (1.546-47)
• St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), called the Angelic Doctor, the Common
Doctor, and (by his schoolmates) the “dumb ox”; a Dominican, a theologian,
and a leading Scholastic philosopher.
36. “Japhet in search of a father!” (1.561)
• Refers to an 1836 novel by Capt. Frederick Marryat (1792-1848), an English
naval officer and novelist.
37. “… and a sail tacking by the Muglins.” (1.576)
• A shoal off Dalkey, the southeastern headland of Dublin Bay; the light on
the Muglins thus marks the southeastern limit of the bay.
38. “And Olivet’s breezy – Goodbye, now, goodbye!” (1.599)
• Olivet, or the Mount of Olives, is just east of Jerusalem. The Garden of
Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed and was arrested on the eve of the
Crucifixion, was located on its western slope.
39. “Creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God.”
(1.612)
• The Nicene Creed (the uniform creed, or Profession of Faith, evolved at the
first Council of Nicaea in 325) is repeated as part of the ordinary of the
Mass every Sunday and at more important feats of the Catholic church.
40. “I am a servant of two masters.” (1.638)
• From the Italian , Il servitore di due padroni, a play by Carlo Goldoni (1707-
93).
41. “…a chemistry of stars.” (1.652-53)
• Alchemy, the study and poetry of which fascinated late-nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century Theosophists, including W. B. Yeats.
42. “…the mass for pope Marcellus…” (1.653)
• Pope Marcellus II (1501-55) lived only twenty-two days after his coronation
in 1555. The Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-94)
wrote the Missa Papae Marcelli.
43. “…and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church
militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs.” (1.654-56)
• The “angel of the Church Militant” is the Archangel Michael, a presence the
Church invoked in its struggle against the spread of the Protestant heresy in
the sixteenth century.
44. “Photius” (1.656)
• (c. 820-c. 891), appointed patriarch of Constantinople (857) against the pope’s
wishes and in the midst of political and religious controversy.
• Photius was excommunicated (863) and in turn convened a church council at
Constantinople and excommunicated the pope and his partisans.
45. “Arius” (1.657)
• (c. 256-336); his heresy: he taught that the Word, or Logos (Christ), was God’s
first creation, that God created him out of nothing; and then Christ created the
Holy Spirit; and then the Holy Spirit created our world.
46. “Valentine” (1.658)
• (d. c. 166), an Egyptian Gnostic who preached in Rome 135-60. His heresy: he
taught that the Demiurge, creator of the material world, was not a member of the
Trinity but a “demon,” remote from the unfathomable God.
47. “Sabellius” (1.659)
• (Third century); his heresy: he maintained that the names “Father,” “Son,”
and “Holy Spirit” were merely three names for the same thing (or three
different aspects or modes of one Being).
48. “My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I’m the Übermensch.” (1.708)
• Übermensch, German: “superman”; after Nietzsche’s Thus Spake
Zarathustra (1883).
