Looking for something to read in the outhouse, Bloom finds "an
old number of Titbits" in the drawer of the
downstairs table. Tit-Bits was a weekly British
magazine founded by the publisher George Newnes, first issued
in October 1881. It pioneered modern forms of popular,
low-brow journalism, but despite the suggestive title and some
sensational elements it was not in the least pornographic. (Photo Bits, on the
other hand, certainly was.) Bloom reads a fictional story in
the magazine and wishes that he too could publish a story
there—as did James Joyce.
Much later, starting in 1939 and continuing for many decades,
Tit-Bits covers often featured pin-up photographs of
beautiful women in scanty clothing that revealed bountiful
breasts. It seems likely that Victorian and Edwardian male
readers would have heard a pun in the magazine's name. As a
word for nipple or breast, "tit" is quite old, and Molly
thinks of it in Penelope: "yes I think he made them
a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he made me thirsty
titties he calls them I had to laugh yes this
one anyhow stiff the nipple gets for the least thing." But a
tit-bit or tid-bit was a tasty morsel of food, the sense that
Stephen has in mind in Proteus when he thinks of
minnows becoming "fat of a spongy titbit"
after chewing on the drowned man's corpse.
According to the lead column in the first issue, the
magazine's tasty morsels consisted of "extracts" from "the
most interesting papers and books" to be found around the
world. The purpose was to entertain as much as to inform: the
reader would encounter "interesting incidents, amusing
anedcotes, pithy paragraphs," and he would acquire "a stock of
smart sayings and a fund of anecdotes which will make his
society agreeable." The magazine was designed to reach a mass
audience, much of which (as Arthur Conan Doyle observed) had
only become literate after passage of the Elementary Education
Act in 1870. Many of its articles were only a paragraph long,
it was printed on cheap paper, and it sold for one penny.
Jokes were its chief draw. Kelly Mays observes that by the
time represented in Ulysses it had grown to a
circulation of over a million copies a week in Britain alone
("The Publishing World," in A Companion to the Victorian
Novel, ed. Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing
[Blackwell, 2002], 23).
But in addition to its extracts from other publications the
paper also published new fiction starting in 1889, and it
sponsored well-paying competitions to attract good writers. P.
G. Wodehouse published an early humorous piece, "Men Who
Missed Their Own Weddings," in the magazine in November 1900.
Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence all
submitted stories. The issue that Bloom reads on the toilet
features "Our prize titbit: Matcham's
Masterstroke. Written by Mr Philip Beaufoy, Playgoers'
Club, London. Payment at the rate of one guinea a column has
been made to the writer. Three
and a half. Three pounds three. Three pounds, thirteen and
six."
In Calypso, kindly envying Mr. Beaufoy his handsome
remuneration, Bloom thinks that he too "Might manage a
sketch," perhaps inventing a story to illustrate "some
proverb," using bits of his wife's conversation. In
Nausicaa, having just seen a "nobleman" passing by, he
thinks that he could write a "prize titbit story"
called The Mystery Man on the Beach, or maybe
instead one on "that fellow today at the graveside in the
brown macintosh." In Eumaeus he wonders whether he
could "meet with anything approaching the same luck as
Mr Philip Beaufoy" if he wrote down My
Experiences in a Cabman's Shelter.
Emulation of Philip Beaufoy runs through all these
meditations, and in Circe Bloom is put on trial as "A
plagiarist. A soapy sneak masquerading as a
literateur. It's perfectly obvious that with the most inherent
baseness he has cribbed some of my bestselling copy, really
gorgeous stuff, a perfect gem, the love passages in which are
beneath suspicion. The Beaufoy books of love and great
possessions, with which your lordship is doubtless familiar,
are a household word throughout the kingdom."
All this literary self-referentiality is capped by the
supreme joke that Mr. Beaufoy is himself a plagiarist: his Matcham's
Masterstroke borrows from a
silly story that Joyce, hoping to win a prize,
submitted to Tit-Bits when he was a student at
Belvedere College in his middle teens, in the late 1890s. In My
Brother's Keeper, Stanislaus Joyce remarks that "'That
Titbits paper' was the only one my father used to
read for general culture" (92). Jim apparently wrote his story
mostly as a joke, but like Bloom he would have been happy to
receive payment for it.
