Bibliography

 

After “nearly two decades” the library of Charles Darwin has been catalogued. The only reason this extensive labour hasn’t taken longer is because no new items have been added since his death in April 1882. James Joyce, who was born two months previous in 1882, February, makes comic mileage listing all the books on Leopold Bloom’s shelves at 7 Eccles Street, Dublin. The seemingly ramshackle bibliography of directories and reckoners, religious texts and war histories, salacious fiction and scientific introductions, serves as its own portrait of the owner, right down to an overdue library book written by Arthur Conan Doyle. Bloom is an autodidact, busy collecting all sorts of seemingly random information towards the greater purpose of figuring everything out that there is to know. The character’s internal dialogues throughout ‘Ulysses’ are stacked with such passing knowledge, there to link his gestating thoughts into some kind of personal worldview, though whether in jest or no, Bloom’s talent for getting things right must be balanced with the times he gets it wrong. The death of bibliography since silicon has been overstated. We discover when we visit online databases just how much Joyce knew about Darwin, where his novels turned evolution, like nearly everything else in creation, into a theory worthy of sport, a serious explanation of life not to be taken too seriously. ‘Ulysses’ is full of Jest So Stories. This example of the view that we are what we read takes on prodigious form when considering the Darwin personal library project. It lists “7,400 titles across 13,000 items including journals, pamphlets and reviews.” The bibliography shows that Darwin was not an autodidact, of course, but worked closely with others, either directly or via the published literature of the day and in many different languages. Item: a German periodical containing the first photograph of bacteria. Item: notes on earthworms by the Revd. James Joyce, superintendent of Roman excavations at Silchester (1877). Victorianism is not dead when we find that the project recovered from auction his copy of Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Wives and Daughters’ (1880), containing a note “This book was a great favourite of Charles Darwin’s and the last book to be read aloud to him.” This is one of the outstanding bibliographical projects of our time, though locally automated catalogues now make it possible to keep quickly accessible records of any donor’s or writer’s collection for future research, an impossible task pre-silicon. Having listed the books of the idiosyncratic Bloom, Joyce then records “what reflections occupied his mind” while gazing at the spines in a mirror: “The necessity of order, a place for everything and everything in its place: the deficient appreciation of literature possessed by females: the incongruity of an apple incuneated in a tumbler and of an umbrella inclined in a closestool: the insecurity of hiding any secret document behind, beneath or between the pages of a book.”