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Joyce and the Irish Socialist Party
James Joyce characterizes Mr. Duffy as an intellectual man who does not have an outlet through which to express his thoughts and ideas. All of that changes when he meets Mrs. Sinico; now, he finally has a person to talk to. Joyce informs the reader that the pair often meet at Mrs. Sinico’s cottage where they discuss a wide array of topics including politics, books, and music. During one such meeting, Mr. Duffy tells her about his brief stint as a member of the Irish Socialist Party. He explains that while he was interested in the idea of socialism, he was unimpressed with the other members of the group and found them to be ineffectual and timorous. “No social revolution,” Mr. Duffy states to Mrs. Sinico, “would be likely to strike Dublin for some centuries.” Mr. Duffy eventually stopped going to the meetings after the Party divided into three separate groups, each with its own leader.
In 1904, the same year that Joyce started to write Dubliners, the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP) and the Irish Socialist Labour Party (ISLP) merged together to create the Socialist Party of Ireland. The Socialist Party of Ireland was originally based in Dublin but it eventually expanded to include groups in Belfast and Cork. Despite expanding their numbers, the Socialist Party of Ireland was a small group that did not have its first conference until 1910. Many, like the fictional Mr. Duffy, were frustrated that the group was not able to do more work or reach a wider audience.
Joyce likely included a brief but pointed discussion of Dublin’s socialist movement in his short story about unlikely connections and lost love because he had a personal interest in the subject. In addition to his interest in Charles Stewart Parnell, Joyce was also interested in socialism and he attended socialist meetings in Dublin in 1904 before he left Ireland. When asked about Joyce’s politics, his brother once said that Joyce “frequented meetings of socialist groups in back rooms.” Joyce’s brother also wrote that “[Joyce] calls himself a socialist but attaches himself to no school of socialism” in a diary entry from 1904. It is possible, then, that Joyce based Mr. Duffy’s account of the socialist meetings in various Dublin garrets on his own personal experiences.
Joyce left Dublin for Italy in 1904 but he did not leave his interest in socialism behind in Ireland. He was impressed with the vivacity of the Italian socialist movement and continued to find inspiration in socialist texts such as Avanti!, the Italian Socialist Party’s daily newspaper and Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Joyce’s affiliation with socialism grew to such a degree that he wrote “my political opinions are those of a socialist artist” in a letter home to Dublin. Joyce worked on Dubliners between 1904-1907, the same time that he was becoming interested in socialism. It makes sense, then, that his political beliefs bled into his fiction.
