Rich collection of elements: youth and adulthood – money matters – trapping marriages – trapping love – ill-conceived duties – Mary – temptations for youth – the ghost of England – the public house – chattered dreams – Jesuits – alcohol – nationalism – unfeminine women – dreams of change – school ploys – Death – Parnell – liberating escape – topographical anchorage of the streets of Dublin. From schoolchildren who left to skip school to supporters of Charles Parnell, the hero of independence, Joyce is more attached to the inhabitants than the city itself.

The last page in which the husband Gabriel is thinking about the young man who once loved his wife, and she him, before Gabriel came onto the scene was just … so sad, so beautifully written. A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Joyce published Dubliners in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916, a play Exiles in 1918 and Ulysses in 1922. Dubliners is, by reputation (among English professors and scholars, at least) one of the greatest collections of short stories ever produced.Class, caste, gender, societal issues, all apparent in a manner that does not take away from the main point of any story.

I have to admit that although I understand the value of the volume and its structure, I did not like it. I didn’t know in Catholicism that The Immaculate Conception (mother of Jesus having conceived although a virgin), though a generally held belief from the time of the Middle Ages, did not become dogma until 1854 (from ‘Grace’). To give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own' - James Joyce, in a letter to his brother.

The collection skillfully captures the everyday struggles and aspirations of its characters and infuses the mundane with profound insights. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. And of course there are classes in this society, so that those of any class except the bottom can always compare themselves pridefully to those below them, should they care to. Counterparts – Farrington, a lumbering alcoholic scrivener, takes out his frustration in pubs and on his son Tom.