The National Library of Ireland has put its collection of James Joyce manuscripts online, free of charge. It’s an excellent resource, but appears daunting at first – so where should the reader start?
From a story in the Irish Times...
The library’s website currently offers a brief “summary”, stressing the manuscripts’ importance, but this alone does not get a reader very far. There is also a very fine bibliographic introduction and description of the documents by assistant keeper Peter Kenny; once more, however, it is more of an introduction to the form of the manuscripts than to their content.
Access to the Joyce manuscripts is discreetly hidden on the National Library’s home page ( nli.ie) behind the rubric “more service enhancements”, under the News category. (Even allowing for the special circumstances, a bit more of a fanfare is in order.) Having found this and done a few more mandatory clicks, a reader will espy “The Joyce Papers 2002, c.1903-1928”. (This confusing title means that they were acquired in 2002 but themselves are dated between 1903 and 1928.) Having clicked on this, the reader will be confronted by a daunting array of numbers listing different manuscripts, each one of which can be clicked on. The detailed “Collection List” provided by Kenny as the first item on this series is helpful at this point. It makes it clear that the manuscripts fall under three main categories: early notes, Ulysses notes and drafts, and Finnegans Wake material.
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