Human Pages, Human Fingers: Stephen’s Schoolbooks in A Portrait

The pedagogical origin of "those sentences" has, as Ron Bush observes, "eluded Joyce scholars for years".1 In an article for Modernism/Modernity published in 2013, however, he revealed that the lines reproduce a drill lifted from the pages of James Cornwell's Spelling for Beginners (1870).2 The present writer made the same discovery in February 2012, but far from representing simply a pip at the post of publication, our near-simultaneous independent findings register instead the charged and changing forms of access to the print record that obtain in the contemporary scholarly landscape.3 It is surely curious that having resisted explicit identification for almost a century, Cornwell's speller should be uncovered twice in the space of a few years. Each sentence of Stephen's proto-poem seems to comment on or complicate the other in some crucial - though crucially undefined - fashion. [...]the pairing also evidences a practice of readerly skimming on Stephen's part, providing an early indicator of the poverty of his reading. Digitised in September 2006 as part of what was then called the "Google FPrint Library Project", the digital book-object available online reproduces both the Bodleian press mark from the physical copy's title page and an accession stamp on the reverse of this leaf.22 The precariousness and contingency of our independent findings should not escape the reader, however: for all the promised immediacy of the digital dimension, whether decried or trumpeted by critics, a single copy of the spelling book proved instrumental to both our discoveries. "23 The availability of Spelling for Beginners online, however, relies on both historical and contemporary conditions of access and, moreover, on the indiscrimination of scanning policy in a library whose collecting mandate was sufficiently broad and robust to acquire and retain children's schoolbooks of the late nineteenth century in the first place.