Born in Rathgar, a township of Dublin, on February 2, 1882, James Joyce was the oldest of ten children, five others dying in infancy. Joyce's father, John Stanislaus Joyce (1849-1931), the prototype for Simon Dedalus of Ulysses, was a charming, bright, but improvident "Mr. Micawber" sort of man, one whose profligacy occasioned the ever-declining family fortunes and led the Joyce children to a life of impoverishment.
Despite his family's economic situation, however, Joyce did manage to secure a fine education. From 1888 to 1891, he attended the prestigious Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, and, from 1893 to 1898, he attended the reputable Belvedere College, a Catholic day school in Dublin. Joyce graduated from University College, Dublin, in 1902.
One particularly important event that occurred during Joyce's schooldays was the death of Charles Stewart Parnell in October, 1891. The young Joyce, reinforced in his political and nationalistic convictions by his father, felt that the great nationalist leader, who fell from grace because of his affair with Kitty O'Shea, had been "betrayed" by his followers — that is, Parnell had been forced to resign from his position as head of Ireland's nationalist party because of the divorce trial of Captain and Kitty O'Shea. To commemorate the occasion of Parnell's death, the 9-year-old Joyce wrote a poem "Et Tu, Healy," which denounced the worst of the turncoats, and one reason that Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man cites for leaving Ireland is his fear that the country will always destroy its prophets.
At University College, Dublin, Joyce openly espoused a number of unpopular causes. He insisted upon the worth of Henrik Ibsen, considered anathema by conservative Dublin Catholics, and, at the age of 18, he published an article on "Ibsen's New Drama" in the Fortnightly Review. In 1900, he delivered a paper, "Drama and Life," before the Literary and Historical Society of the College, which advocated modern dramatists, as opposed to Shakespeare and the Greeks. Joyce's article "The Day of the Rabblement" (1901) denounced the beginning Irish theater movement, which Joyce believed was too insular, too cut off from European culture. Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats, and other leaders of the Irish Literary Theatre, it seemed to Joyce, were being too provincial in their stress upon peasant and folk drama.
