Even before its London publication in 1914, James Joyce's Dubliners caused considerable controversy due to the material in the stories that was obvious and accessible, available to even the most casual readers and reviewers. The collection all but overflows with unattractive human behavior: simony, truancy, pederasty, drunkenness (all of them in the first three stories alone!), child and spousal abuse, gambling, prostitution, petty thievery, blackmail, and suicide. The use throughout of the names of Dublin streets and parks — and especially shops, pubs, and railway companies — was seen as scandalous, too. (In the past, fiction writers had almost invariably changed the names of their short-story and novel settings, or discretely left them out altogether.) In fact, including these details delayed publication of the book by years, as potential publishers and printers feared lawsuits by those businesses mentioned by name. Disrespectful dialogue about the king of England, and even the use of the mild British oath "bloody," were thought by many to go beyond the bounds of good taste — and they did. In contrast to his status-conscious character Gabriel Conroy, James Joyce rejected good taste — one of the characteristics that mark his art as Modern.
A precedent existed for Joyce's warts-and-all approach, in the nineteenth-century French school of writing known as Naturalism, but no writer had ever been quite as explicit, or as relentlessly downbeat, as Joyce in Dubliners. To this day, despite a more liberal attitude in art and entertainment regarding the issues dramatized in the book (premarital sex, for instance, is hardly the taboo it was when "The Boarding House" appeared), many first-time readers are distracted by the unsavory surface details of nearly all the stories. This distraction can prevent them from appreciating Dubliners' deeper, more universal themes. It can be difficult to see the forest in this book for the blighted, stunted, gnarled trees. Of course, the forest is no fairyland, either. For Joyce's three major themes in Dubliners are paralysis, corruption, and death. All appear in the collection's very first story, "The Sisters" — and all continue to appear throughout the book, up to and including the magnificent final tale, "The Dead."
