Monosyllabic Aesop: Lenehan’s fabulous lure 

Lenehan spontaneously ridicules as a “solfa fable” the reading matter in which Miss Kennedy pretends to be absorbed, in order to avoid his pushy overtures.1 Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner (Annotations to James Joyce’s Ulysses) state that “a ‘solfa fable’ would be a fable told in monosyllables like sol-fa”. The expression “solfa fable” is not documented elsewhere, but the concept is not Lenehan’s invention. This note rehearses Lenehan’s confusion over the Aesop’s Fable he cites, and points out that he has not been alone in making this error, but more importantly looks briefly at the history of using monosyllabic versions of Aesop’s Fables to help children learn to read.

  Confusion of the fables: As commentators have pointed out, Lenehan actually conflates two traditional fables, “The Fox and the Stork” (where the stork pays the fox back for offering him a dinner of soup which he can’t eat with his bill) and “The Wolf and the Crane” (where the crane’s unexpected payment for putting his bill into the wolf’s throat to remove a bone lodged there is to be grateful he was not eaten by the wolf when he was so vulnerable). But Lenehan was not the first to confuse the fables, examples of which occur from time to time: in F. E. Burnett’s translation of Wilhelm Lûbke’s History of sculpture (1878) sculptures on the façade of Lyons Cathedral are said to include “scenes … from animal fable-life, such as the stork drawing a bone from the fox’s throat”; in Mary Bennett’s The gentle art of pleasing (1898) a character recalls “the exchange of courtesies between Mr. Wolf and Mrs. Stork, as reported in Esop’s Fables”.2

  An educational tradition: Lenehan was not inventing a system of monosyllabic reading aids, but tapped into a history of real, often illustrated, versions of Aesop’s Fables for young readers. The tradition goes back at least to the beginning of the eighteenth century, to London schoolmaster and lexicographer Thomas Dyche’s Guide to the English tongue, of which the first edition appeared in 1707. By 1737 the text had expanded to include an Appendix of “Additional Lessons, Consisting of Words of one Syllable, both in Prose and Verse”. Dyche died in the 1720s, and so additions to the text are presumably by another hand. The Appendix includes several of Aesop’s Fables rewritten in monosyllabic prose and then in verse, such as “The Wolf and the Crane”.

  Pre-empting later educationalists, Dyche also separates syllables in multisyllabic words with hyphens:

  But Dyche well predates Joyce’s day, and the tradition was from the mid-nineteenth century carried by such writers as Lucy Aikin (“Mary Godolphin”), in her popular Æsop's Fables, in words of one syllable, published by Cassell’s in 1868 (and remaining in print until 1914) and Olive Brookfield (“Mrs Arthur Brookfield), whose Aesop’s Fables for Little Readers appeared in 1888. These either use only words of one syllable or split longer ones into single syllables with a hyphen. For Lucy Aikin (or her publisher: she died in 1864 and the first text was published in 1867/8) at least the “words of one syllable” format was a very profitable publishing venture, and alongside Aesop’s Fables she produces similar editions of Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, Pilgrim’s Progress, and others. As teaching aid these texts but not superimpose Lenehan’s childish phonetic respellings, and his attempt at parroting a sol-fa reading emphasises unstressed syllables to create a similar effect: “Ah fox met ah stork. Said thee fox to thee stork […]. But: “He droned in vain” (11.250).

Eamonn Finn, John Simpson, and Harald Beck