There will be walking tours during Bloomsday Festival #jamesjoyce #dublin

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Dublin in 1900 had of any major city in the world um the it was in the top 10 um highest infant mortality rates of any major city in the world. It was out there with Glasgow, with uh St. Petersburg, Russia, with Calcutta. You know, it was a brutal place, I think in a lot of ways, and Joyce reflects this in his work. I take it that some of you have read his work, and I think you get that sense of the poverty, you know, the lack of opportunity. Uh the the just kind of the dirtiness and the depressing atmosphere that existed here. Um Joyce called Dublin a center of paralysis, a city of paralysis, and he I think was referring to this kind of thing. The you know, the the really kind of day-to-day lives of a lot of these people here, who even if you weren't kind of dirt poor or a laborer or what have you, still things were not thriving. This was not a land of opportunity. And it's the reason why he left, you know, he left like so many of his countrymen and countrywomen, uh and went off to the United States, to England, to so many other places.