When Bloom thinks in Ithaca about all the flowers he
will plant around his luxurious country cottage, he has a
particular nursery in mind: "sir James W. Mackey Limited,
wholesale and retail seed and bulb merchants and nurserymen,
agents for chemical manures, 23 Sackville street, upper."
This well-known shop, next door to the Gresham Hotel where
Gretta and Gabriel stay in The Dead, had been in
business at the Upper Sackville (or O'Connell) Street
address since 1878. It housed "seedsmen," selective breeders
offering both exotic plants and improved versions of familiar
ones.
The roots of the business, which reach back into the 18th
century, are detailed in an article by Hazel P. Smyth, "Two
Hundred Years a'Growing: The Story of Mackey's Seeds
Limited—1777-1977," Dublin Historical Record 35.3
(1982): 100-15. One of the partners in an older seeds firm
called Toole and Mackey was Stephen Mackey, whose son James
William Mackey inherited his portion of the business, as well
as land holdings in County Cork, at his death in 1854. The
younger Mackey became well respected both as a businessman and
as a politician. An Alderman in the early 60s, was elected
Lord Mayor in 1866 and again in 1873, and after the second
term he was knighted. In 1880 he was elected High Sheriff of
Dublin. Mackey died on 14 December 1892, and was buried next
to his father in the family crypt in St. Andrew's church in
Westland Row.
The seeds business, located on Westmoreland Street at the
time of the elder Mackey's death, divided in 1860 into Toole
& Company and James W. Mackey. In 1878 the Mackey part
moved to Upper Sackville Street, which at the time was a
fashionable place for shopping. On 5 April 1922 it was
destroyed in a fire that burned all the businesses on the east
side of the street from 9 to 28, and some buildings on the
west side as well. After rebuilding on the same site, the
business reopened in 1925. In 1969 the Gresham Hotel swallowed
up the building in an expansion, and in 1970 Mackey's Seeds
Ltd. moved to Mary Street.
§ The
passage in Ithaca that mentions Mackey's is textually
problematic in many ways. Gabler's text contradicts all
earlier editions in changing its singular nouns ("merchant
and nurseryman, agent for chemical manures") to plurals.
Although such reversals of longstanding editorial practice
frequently seem arbitrary and unhelpful in the Gabler text, in
this instance there are good reasons to endorse the new
version. By 1904 Sir James had been dead for more than a
decade, so there was no single "man" to correspond to the
singular labels. The building's façade advertised it as a
place of "seedsmen" and "nurserymen." The listing in the 1904
edition of Thom's (p. 1585) from which Joyce was no
doubt working contained the plurals quoted in the novel. And
an ad published in a 1914 copy of the Carlovian, Sir
James' old college magazine, proclaimed "Ireland's Premier
Seed Establishment / James W. Mackey Ltd. / Seedsmen."
Other problems concern punctuation. The 1922 first edition is
a disaster: "sweet pea, lily of the valley, [bulbs
obtainable, from sir James W. Mackey (Limited)] wholesale
and retail seed and bulb merchant and nurseryman, agent for
chemical manures, 23 Sackville Street, upper)." The
layering of hard brackets on top of parentheses is cumbersome;
the brackets separate the name of the business from its
description; the parenthesis after "upper" closes a
parenthetical clause that was never opened; superfluous commas
are intruded both before and after "bulbs obtainable"; and a
necessary comma is omitted after "Limited."
The first Odyssey Press edition in 1932 removed the inept
comma after "bulbs obtainable" and installed a complete set of
parentheses around the long parenthetical clause. It removed
the absurd bracketing of "bulbs . . . (Limited)," but replaced
it with an equally absurd pair of brackets around "wholesale
and retail." The Bodley Head edition that became the basis of
Random House and Penguin texts in the 1960s improved on this
version very slightly by removing the comma after "lily of the
valley," but it left the brackets in place.
The 1986 Gabler text finally did away with troublesome
brackets altogether, and it may arguably be the best possible
version of this tortured sentence. However, by retaining the
parentheses around "Limited" it perpetuates the Odyssey
editions' highly inelegant practice of burying parentheses
within parentheses. And it does not place a comma following
that word, where one seems required. To address these issues,
I have made my own arbitrary decision, in editing this text
for the website, to eliminate the inner set of parentheses an
insert a comma: "sir James W. Mackey Limited, wholesale and
resale seed and bulb merchants."
