The advantages of being born with a silver knife in your mouth 

Bloom reflects appreciatively on the expression “born with a silver knife in his mouth”, as if he knows he is repeating someone else’s phrase. “The allusion” is obvious, to the old expression “to be born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth”, though with another item of cutlery, maybe an elegant tea knife, replacing the workaday “spoon”.

  The original expression is located by the OED (the entry is currently unrevised from the early years of the twentieth century) to the American Congressional debates of 1801, and defined as “to be born in affluence or under lucky auspices”. Modern research can take the expression in English back to at least the first years of the eighteenth century, in Peter Motteux’s translation of Don Quixote (Vol. 3, 1703, ch. 73 p. 720). It was quite settled in the language by Joyce’s day.

  But what of Bloom’s twist? It wasn’t Joyce’s coinage, but had a history of over thirty years by the time of Ulysses.  The first reference tracked down to date comes from the Christmas edition of the popular British magazine Puck, where it appears to be one of a number of humorous bon mots which were the stock-in-trade of the popular press, passed round and syndicated avidly. This one presumably derives originally (but not necessarily) from America, where antecedents have not yet been located:

They tell of a Chicago man whose parents were so very rich, that he was born with a silver knife in his mouth (Christmas Puck, 5 December, 1888, p. 255).

  Chicago? Riches perhaps acquired by nefarious means? Not to be outdone, the Toronto Saturday Night gives it a Canadian provenance:

They tell of a Hamilton man whose parents were so very rich that he was born with a silver knife in his mouth (“Alleged Humor” in Toronto Saturday Night, 15 December 1888, p. 6).

       In the next year Life magazine takes up the cudgels with an illustration, captioned:

        But for the popularity of the expression this side of the Atlantic we are perhaps indebted to G. K. Chesterton, who wrote in What’s wrong with the world in 1910:

The English statesman is bribed not to be bribed. He is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may never afterwards be found with the silver spoon in his pocket … In [his] case … to say that he is born with a silver spoon in his mouth is at once inadequate and excessive. He is born with a silver knife in his mouth. But all this only illustrates the English theory that poverty is perilous for a politician (G. K. Chesterton, “The Unfinished Temple”, in What’s wrong with the world (1910), pp. 40-1)

The phrase was picked up widely, and reiterated as a typical Chestertonian chestnut.

John Simpson