One among many newspapers
mentioned in Ulysses, the Dublin Evening Mail
was a daily distributed in the evening on buff-colored
(brownish yellow) sheets, competing with the pink-colored Evening Telegraph, the
Dublin Evening Standard, and the Evening Herald.
Although this paper figures prominently in one of the stories
of Dubliners, it is never mentioned in Ulysses.
In Wandering Rocks, however, several men meet on the
street outside "the Mail office" at 37-38 Parliament
Street.
ยง The
first issues of the Mail appeared in the early 1820s,
and the paper quickly gained considerable popularity. In 1904,
however, its circulation was much smaller than those of the Telegraph,
the Freeman's Journal,
and the Irish Times, all
of which had gained national readerships. By this time the Mail
had become a staunchly unionist paper. Its editors took
conservative positions on issues like land reform during the
last decades of the 19th century, and opposed Gladstone's
negotiations with Parnell for Home
Rule.
In "A Painful Case," Mr. Duffy sits in a restaurant eating
corned beef and cabbage and staring at "a paragraph in the
evening paper which he had propped against the
water-carafe." After losing his appetite and walking off into
the night, the narrative notices "the fringe of the buff Mail
peeping out of a side-pocket of his tight reefer
overcoast." At home in his bedroom, he takes the paper out of
the pocket and reads the article again. The narrative
reproduces the newspaper headline:
DEATH OF A LADY AT SYDNEY PARADE
A PAINFUL CASE
The extensive text that follows (566 words) seems to present
the newspaper article nearly verbatim, anticipating Aelous
in its willingness to incorporate the conventions of print
journalism into a literary fiction.
Among other items of interest for 16 June 1904, the image of
the first page of that day's Mail accompanying this
note contains announcements of Mrs. Bandmann Palmer appearing
in Leah at the Gaiety Theatre (upper left), and Eugene Stratton
appearing at the Theatre Royal (immediately to the
right).
