The "Cochrane" in Stephen's Dalkey classroom may be the first of Joyce's many, many borrowings from Thom's Directory, an annually revised listing of residents and addresses, first published in the 1840s, which gave the exiled writer a detailed record of Dublin's people, homes, and businesses. The 1904 Thom's shows that a Charles H. Cochrane lived in Cambridge House, 38 Ulverton Road, Dalkey and worked as a solicitor from offices on Frederick Street in Dublin––a fact consistent with Stephen's thoughts in later paragraphs that the boys in the school are "Welloff people," well aware of "the fees their papas pay."

Born in Scotland in 1801, Alexander Thom came to Ireland with his family in 1813 and founded his Irish Almanac and Official Directory in 1844. The Dublin Street Directory is still published annually (see www.thoms.ie). Joyce used the 1904 edition to reconstruct Dublin from his places of exile on the Continent, as Vladimir Nabokov observed in Lectures on Literature: "The Dublin setting is built partly on data supplied by an exile's memory, but mainly on data from Thom's Dublin Directory." The name "Cochrane" in the first sentence of Nestor seems to be the first fruit of this extensive consultation of the directory.

Examination of the Thom's page reproduced at right will reveal a staggering number of crowded "tenements," "vacant" properties, and sheer "ruins," scattered among the addresses occupied by middle-class property owners and renters. Joyce's fiction largely concerns itself with this small and precarious Catholic middle class, glancing only occasionally at the moneyed Protestants who live in places like Dalkey and the miserable masses crammed into tenements, boarding houses, and paupers' homes.

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