Introduction to the fourteenth issue

This issue marks the three-hundredth article published in the James Joyce Online Notes since it first went online in 2011. The sequence over this eight-year period started with Harald Beck’s investigation into the life of Bartell d’Arcy (Bartle McCarthy), and has – to date – reached No 305, with Ronan Crowley’s identification of Joyce’s notesheet references to William Wrankmore’s translation of Moritz Busch’s Guide for travellers in Egypt and adjacent countries.

Obscure? Well, yes. Partly because of Joyce’s intended obscurantism, but also because over the years we have forgotten many of the references which would have been familiar, or at least not unknown, to the people who inhabited Joyce’s world at the turn of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth.

We are, as ever, grateful to Joyce scholars for providing JJON with further articles uncovering forgotten details or for making connections that have evaded researchers in the past. In this issue, Geert Lemout follows the trail of moechus ("adulterer"), which Joyce curiously describes as a neuter noun, and then returns later in the issue to look into Buck Mulligan’s use of Swinburne. Terence Killeen puts the case that "the king of Spain’s daughter" may derive not directly from the nursery rhyme, but from a poem by Padraic Colum.

Other pieces in this issue include John Simpson’s account of the life of Francis Irwin (a significant component of Joyce’s character Garrett Deasy): did he really attend TCD? What is the story? And Harald Beck discovers that Lenehan’s "Did she fall or was she pushed?" – addressed "dreamily" to Miss Kennedy as she calls a temporary halt to her reading – suggests that she was not reading a "smutty" text, as has been proposed, but more likely something more respectable.

Harald Beck

John Simpson

Editors, JJON