Dubliners, one of the great short story collections in the English language, was first published in London on 15 June 1914 by Grant Richards, who had rejected the original set of twelve stories in September 1906; in the interim, according to Joyce, it was turned down by forty publishers.
The author is his own best interlocutor:
‘My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.’ James Joyce
The text of this Lilliput edition derives from Robert Scholes’ 1967 corrected edition, which restored Joyce’s original punctuation and typography. The print is offset from the 1986 Dolmen Press edition, designed by Liam Miller using Eric Gill’s fourteen-point letterpress Joanna, and issued in a limited run of five hundred copies of which four hundred were for sale and one hundred hors commerce.
From the first trade edition, published by the Lilliput Press, now comes the mass market demi format, which retains fifty-seven of the ninety original lithographs by the artist Louis le Brocquy. Le Brocquy’s drawings, hieroglyphic ‘shadows thrown by the text’, are haunting accompaniments to these fifteen stories or ‘incidents’ in the life of a city, in Joyce’s first major prose work.
With this handsome edition, Dubliners returns fittingly to its source.
