Facts in Dubliners

The River Dodder is one of the three main rivers in Dublin, the others being the Liffey and the Tolka. The Dodder flows into the Liffey and is its largest tributary.

The Liffey is the main river upon which Dublin is built. It flows from west to east, dividing the city between a north and south side. Joyce, as well as all native Dubliners before and after him, would have been conscious of the distinctions between these two sides (such as which is for the more affluent, which is for the poor, etc.).

A district in Dublin associated with the working class, Ringsend is located south of the mouth of the river Liffey. At the time this story was set, Ringsend was essentially a self-contained village.

This was a well known place to swim on the north side of Dublin bay. Due to building development, it is no longer in existence.

Cricket is an English game and was associated in Ireland with the English conquest. Irish nationalists viewed the game as non-national, preferring the Gaelic games of football and hurling. The Gaelic Athletic Association, founded in 1884, promoted national sports and after 1902 included a ban on its members from participating in “foreign games.”

This road, now known as the East Wall Road, runs along the top of a wall built to make sure the River Tolka stays on its course. Without the wall, the city’s northeastern areas could flood.

Based on the setting that Joyce has established in “The Sisters” and this story thus far, Dublin readers would understand this to be Belvedere College, a school for boys run by the Jesuits and renowned for the rigor of its instruction and the quality of its education. Joyce himself went there and many of his experiences provided material for stories in Dubliners as well as in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

The two phrases here (Hardly had the day... and Hardly had the day dawned...) are spoken by Loe Dillon as Father Butler admonishes him. It has been noted that Dillon is likely reading from Caesar’s account of his Gallic wars in Commentarii de Bello Gallico, as several of his opening statements on particular campaign days could be translated this way.

Lord Lytton (1803–1873) was an English politician and novelist. Many of his works, and also his actual life, were considered morally suspect by the prudish and the religious since they involved sensational and romantic material. He also coined many expressions still used today: “It was a dark and stormy night,” and “The pen is mightier than the sword,” among others.

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) was a Scottish poet and historical novelist whose work is best known for dealing with material that evoke in readers a sense of nostalgia or romanticism about the past.

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) was an Irish poet and the author of Irish Melodies. This text, known as simply Melodies, were enormously popular in Dublin during the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

“Sixpence” is a small, silver coin that was worth about six pennies. By saving this much, the narrator likely means that they had this amount on them, rather than one coin of this value. At the time this story is set, such an amount of money was likely a week’s allowance for a middle-class child.

This is a title of a story in The Halfpenny Marvel which, most likely, is a story about the battles between the Native Americans and the cowboys or United States government. The Apache are an Athabascan tribe whose former territory was an expansive tract of land in southwestern North America.

This term refers to the mock battles that children sometimes played with one team pretending to be cowboys; the other, Native Americans. The prevalence of this “game” was directly connected to the adventurous, romantic portrayal of the Wild West in the popular imagination, which the boys likely read about in their magazine stories.

Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel were popular boys’ magazines that were published in England with the goal to provide clean, instructive stories of adventure. Together with The Union Jack, the goals of these magazines and stories suggest the promotion of an English, imperial agenda in late-Victorian British culture to young boys.

The national flag on the United Kingdom is known as the Union Jack. At the time this story was written, the United Kingdom was officially known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In addition to being the name of the flag, Here, The Union Jack refers to a popular boys’ magazine, like Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel.

Commonly used to refer to the time when the Western United States existed in a period of lawless development, the Wild West also has been used as the setting for adventure stories. This has led to romantic associations in the popular culture of the Wild West with danger, opportunity, and lone heroes.

The Arab's Farewell to his Steed is an Irish poem written by Caroline Norton (1808 – 1877). It was very popular at the time as a piece for recitation in school.

One of the ways the revolutionary efforts in 19th- and early-20th-century Ireland acquired public support was to rely on a songs and ballads to recount to wrongdoing done to Ireland and the heroic exploits of Irish patriots.

Songs of this style were typically well known ballads that employed the particular phrase “Come all you gallant Irishmen and listen to my song" in order to get everyone's attention.

Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa (1831–1915) was a Fenian revolutionary responsible for organizing several revolutionary attacks against England (one of them earning him the nickname "Dynamite Rossa"). He was elected to Parliament in 1869 when serving a life sentence for treason.

The Christian Brothers' School was a Roman Catholic school for boys well known for its challenging, if not always humane, efforts to educate Ireland's poor. The school was run by a teaching order founded by Ignatius Rice in Waterford in 1802. Joyce briefly went to the Christian Brothers’ School in North Richmond Street in 1893.

While the color brown helps establish a more disheartening and somber tone for the story, this color of brick was commonly used to construct Dublin houses. The brown bricks were known as Dolphin’s Barn, an inner-city suburb of Dublin, bricks because they were made in that part of the city.

The Memoirs of Vidocq was written by Francois-Jules Vidocq and published in 1829. This popular 19th-century novel concerns the exploits of a Parisian Police Commissioner who uses his status to cover up the crimes he commits. Joyce includes the book here to presents and support the theme of deception in the story. As seen in "An Encounter," deception, and how the characters in Dubliners deceive others and themselves, runs throughout the texts. The boy narrator doesn't understand the significance of these books, which strengthens the deception, because we readers can understand their purpose but the boy himself remains ignorant of their meaning and influence.

The Devout Communicant refers to a popular Catholic work written by Franciscan Friar Pacificus Baker. Published in 1761, the text uses pious and religious language that perhaps explains how the boy narrator talks about Mangan's sister.

Sir Walter Scott wrote The Abbot in 1820. It is a historical novel that portrays the events surrounding the life of Mary Queen of Scots. Religious and romantic, the story focuses on the central character, Roland Graeme, who gets involved in a plot full of adventure and romance—much like the young narrator of "Araby." The presence of this text supports the notion that romantic, religious, and materialist love is not only complex but also confusing for Joyce's narrator.

This city is the capital of Argentina, a country in South America. During the 19th and early 20th century, Buenos Aires was a thriving and wealthy city due to the many European immigrants who settled there.

This city is located in Victoria State, Australia. During the 19th century, many Irish criminals were transported to Australia and many emigrants also chose to settle there. Because of the large Catholic-Irish population of the country at the time, the Catholic priesthood was most significantly Irish in terms of personnel and belief.

According to an irish myth, kissing the Blarney Stone, a block of stone on the battlements of Blarney Castle in Ireland, gives a person the ability to speak easily and confidently. This is where the phrase "the gift of the gab" comes from. In context, Farrington is asking "Why did you even say anything?" because he sees the man as having had nothing of value to add.