The Prestigious School that Hosts ISI’s Summer Camp for Teenagers (Blog Post III)

James Joyce and Belvedere College (“Blog Post III”)

Did you know that James Joyce was educated at Belvedere College, the prestigious private school that hosts our English Summer Camp for Teenagers, for no less than five of what were arguably the most formative years of his life? Joyce — who would go on to become a world-famous novelist of the modernist avant-garde, making Belvedere College renowned worldwide through his autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) — entered Belvedere in 1893 at the tender age of 11 and proved himself to be a very bright pupil there right up until his departure upon graduation in 1898 at the hardy age of 16. In a previous blog post, we shed partial light on ISI’s unique relationship — as an English school in Dublin — to this stalwart literary figure; universally acclaimed as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. In this blog post, part “III” of a very enlightening series of “V” (you can read part “II” here) chcemy Państwa jeszcze bardziej oświecić, skupiając się na bogatym dziedzictwie religijnym Belvedere College - bazy naszego Letniego Obozu Języka Angielskiego w Dublinie - a także na miejscu Joyce'a, jako jednego z wielu słynnych absolwentów, w nim i poza nim.

James Joyce graduated from Belvedere College, S.J., in 1898, by far its most famous alumnus. In his biography of Joyce, Richard Ellmann covers the five years that the budding writing spent here, but credits Kevin Sullivan’s “painstaking book,” Joyce among the Jesuits (1958), for its comprehensive account of Joyce’s experiences with his influential teachers. “They’ll be of service to him in after years,” we read in the oblique autobiographical novel A Portrait, “[t]hose are the fellows that can get you a position.”

In Bruce Bradley, S.J.,’s James Joyce’s Schooldays (1982), which has a foreword by Ellmann, we encounter a Jesuit authority on Joyce who cites the young author’s own resolve to stay with the Jesuits when courted by the Dominicans: “I began with the Jesuits and I want to end with them,” we read in A Portrait; and later: “They taught me how to survey and to judge.” In his foreword to Bradley’s Schooldays, Ellmann adds that the Jesuits equipped Joyce with “the ritual and moral codes which, in all his rebellion, he would never cease to find fascinating. For Joyce’s books could not exist without Catholicism as panoply or as theme.”

The “position” prophesied in A Portrait (above) in “after years” transpired to be one situated in the literary pantheon. Joyce’s debt to his Jesuit education, both as a writer and a as person, has been sufficiently explored in disquisitions on his life and works. Rather than suggest fresh perspectives for that discussion here, this post and the following one will follow Leo M. Manglaviti, S.J., in revisiting (see part “I” in this series of blogposts) a “living artefact of that education, Belvedere House, the Jesuit community residence at Joyce’s Dublin alma matter.” With Manglaviti, we are curious about what Joyce saw each day during the years he spent in Great Denmark Street?

Interestingly, Manglaviti claims “students in Joyce’s time saw very little of the Jesuit residence itself, except for the imposing facade on Great Denmark Street.” Manglaviti’s “Sticking to the Jesuits: Revisiting Belvedere House” (2000) follows Bradley’s account in noting how this “house, which was acquired by the school in 1841, was no longer in use for school matters in the 1890s, since by that time all student activities were centered in the adjoining buildings.” Accordingly, a student at Belvedere College would, in Joyce’s day, only have seen the stunning interiors of Belvedere House itself through a private invitation from one of their Jesuit superiors— as this was their living quarters — and there is no extant evidence to suggest the young Joyce was ever accorded one. For Bradley, “[t]his accounts for Joyce’s ‘surprising failure’ to have Stephen in A Portrait make ‘any mention at all of the magnificent interior decoration’ of the main hall, stairway, or rooms in the classical style dedicated to Apollo, Venus, and Diana . . .”

Did you know that it was during his time at Belvedere College — in being assigned an English composition topic “My Favourite Hero” — that Joyce first read Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses (1808): the book which would inspire the outline for his world-famous novel? It was also in relation to his time at Belvedere College that Constantin Curran, a close friend of Joyce and a character in A Portrait, would write: “So far as teaching can make a writer, it was at Belvedere that the neophyte learned his art . . .”

Read all about it in the next of this series of blog posts!