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1864: Browning uses name for character in Aurora Leigh [etext]
1868: born: William Kirkpatrick Magee in Dublin, son of Protestant clergyman
Trinity classics
pre-1882: Name 'Wm Eglinton' used by British medium ST Davey, who went mad!?
[cite] [cite] [cite] [cite] [cite]"Your best, your most powerful mediums, have all suffered in health of body and mind. Think of the sad end of Charles Foster, who died in an asylum, a raving lunatic; of Slade, an epileptic; of Eglinton -- the best medium now in England -- subject to the same." [source]
post-1885: joins Hermetic Society, Theosophists (?) [ambiguous]
1896: Two Essays on the Remnant (admires Goethe, Schiller, Wordsworth, Shelley)
1899: Yeats writes "John Eglinton and Spiritual Art" [cite]
[wrt Ulysses ch9] The role of the artist and the theater in Ireland's struggles had been a hot topic of debate in Dublin circles since at least 1898, when Eglinton attacked Yeats for favoring Irish folk themes, which Eglinton thought sacrificed relevance for esthetics. Russell even interceded in 1899 with a tepid compromise. [timeline&links]Yeats and Lady Gregory were at that time busy organising the Irish Literary Theatre, whose 1899 debut of Yeats' Countess Cathleen was met with a brouhaha (which Joyce describes in Portrait [qv]) for not being unambiguously politically nationalistic enough. Joyce admired that anti-commercial quality in Cathleen but accused Yeats two years later (in "Day of the Rabblement") of selling out with Diarmuid and Grania and Hyde's Twisting of the Rope.
1899: contributed to Yeats's Literary Ideals in Ireland [cite]
1901: Pebbles from a Brook (essays in style of Matthew Arnold) [cite]
1901ff: hangs with George Moore [cite]
celibate, teetotal
1903: meets Joyce (back in Dublin over Xmas)
JAJ to JE: "If I knew I were to drop dead before I reached that lamppost, it would mean no more to me than it will mean to walk past it."
JE to OG re JAJ: "There is something sublime in Joyce's standing alone."
1904: founds Dana: a Magazine of Independent Thought with Fred Ryan; rejects JAJ's 'Portrait' [etext]
JE to JAJ: "I can't print what I can't understand."
1904-1922: National Library (sub-librarian, then head)
Stannie Joyce on JE: "Magee is a dwarfish, brown-clad fellow, with red-brown eyes like a ferret, who walks with his hands in his jacket pockets and as stiffly as if his knees were roped with sugauns. He is sub-librarian in Kildare Street, and I think his mission in Ireland is to prove to his Protestant grandaunts that unbelievers can be very moral and admire the Bible. He is interested in great thoughts and philosophy, whenever he can understand it." (Ellmann 147)
Joyce's limerick:
There once was a Celtic librarian
Whose essays were voted Spencerian
His name is Magee
But it seems that to me
He's a flavour that's more Presbyterian
1904: JE pays a guinea for JAJ poem in Dana [etext]
1904: Sept: meets Joyce after Tower debacle:
"One morning, just as the National Library opened, Joyce was announced; he seemed to wish for somebody to talk to, and related quite ingenuously how in the early hours of the morning he had been thrown out of the tower, and had walked into town from Sandycove."
1905: Some Essays and Passages (selected by Yeats)
1905: JAJ send JE copy of 'Holy Office' critiquing him: [etext]
Or him who will his hat unfix
Neither to malt nor crucifix
But show to all that poor-dressed be
His high Castilian courtesy
1916: Ernest A. Boyd's Ireland's Literary Renaissance includes chapter "The Dublin Mystics -- The Theosophical Movement" referring to JE as "the theosophists' gift to the Literary Revival of Ireland's only great essayist" and praises Pebbles from a Brook as one of the few books Ireland had produced until then "which challenged comparison with the best prose of any English-speaking country. It transcends the relative standards by which we have to judge the bulk of Anglo-Irish literature" [cite]
1918: "Irish Books" in Anglo-Irish Essays
1919: S&C episode of Ulysses published in the 'Little Review'
1921-29: frequent "Dublin Letters" in The Dial magazine [cites]
1922: Ulysses published
JE in the June 1922 'Dial', paraphrased: "Eglinton reveals that he does not fully understand Ulysses, even the parts in which his character appears" [cite]
1922: resigns Library and retires to England in protest of Irish Free State
1929: edited Letters of George Moore to Edward Dujardin [cite]
1935: Irish Literary Portraits [cite]
1937: A Memoir of AE: George William Russell [quote]
1942: Letters of George Moore
1961: died
1979: Lenoski, Daniel. "Yeats, Eglinton, and Aestheticism." Eire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 14.iv (1979): 91-108. [cite]
1994: BRYSON, MARY E "Dublin Letters: John Eglinton and The Dial," Eire lreland, XXIX:4 (Winter 1994). [cite]
passim: StonyBrook, Emory
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