Mr Best

The character repeatedly called "Mr Best" in Scylla and Charybdis never receives a first name in the narrative, though he himself tells readers what it is: "That is my name, Richard, don't you know. I hope you are going to say a good word for Richard, don't you know, for my sake." Richard Irvine Best, "R. I." or "Best" to his friends, became the assistant director of the National Library of Ireland in 1904. By that time he was beginning to make a name for himself as an eminent scholar of ancient Irish mythology and philology, but in Joyce's portrait he seems like a young and negligible attendant on the more august personages of George Russell, John Eglinton, and Thomas Lyster. Best was not pleased with the way Joyce rendered him, and complained about it much later in a BBC interview.

John Hunt 2024

Drawing of Richard Best as a young man by John Butler Yeats, location unknown but possibly the Old Scots Church, Derry. Source: www.facebook.com.


Photographic portrait of Richard Best later in his life, artist and date unknown.  Source: Wikimedia Commons.


1936 graphite on paper drawing of Best by Seán O'Sullivan, held in the National Gallery of Ireland.  Source: onlinecollection.nationalgallery.ie.


2024 photograph of 3 Bishop Street in Derry, the house in which Best was born and raised.  Source: John Hunt.