{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0391041592605759, 'fraction_numerical': 0.02132954141485958, 'mean_word_length': 4.887029288702929, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 1, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Real People of Joyce's "Ulysses": A Biographical Guide by Vivien Igoe (review)

R Martin Adams’s 1962 Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” was the first book to take seriously the underlying reality of “Joyce’s Dublin” in its relation to the work.1 Adams spent time in Dublin, consulted Thom’s Directory very profitably,2 collated carefully the lives and trajectories of several characters in the book with those of their real-life counterparts (some of whom appear in Ulysses under their actual names, some under fictitious ones), and derived considerable enlightenment from observing discrepancies and congruities. A trailblazing effort in this regard was Richard Ellmann’s famous chapter in his Joyce biography, “The Backgrounds of Ulysses.”3 But Adams was the first to delve thoroughly into the background of the work and to “deconstruct,” as we would say today, some of the more mythical and symbolical readings of the text. He brought them back to basics, as it were, back to the world of the Dublin that Joyce knew. Following Adams’s initiative, further studies were undertaken into the actuality, or the factuality, of Joyce’s world: books such as Michael Seidel’s Epic Geography explored how the map of Dublin was overlaid on that of The Odyssey to create a congruence between Homer’s world and that of Bloom.4 Bernard and Shari Benstock’s Who’s He When He’s at Home: A James Joyce Directory was a first attempt at a census of the characters in Ulysses, an exercise that became an increasing preoccupation later.5 Works by R. B. Kershner and Cheryl Herr explored the neglected popular culture of the time, which is such a major substratum of the book.6 And volumes of annotations such as those of Don Gifford and Robert A. Seidman and Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian, and John Turner also contributed substantially to knowledge of the background of Joyce’s fiction.7 More recently, the website James Joyce Online Notes has greatly expanded these investigations: the internet, including resources such as the digitized Irish censuses of 1901 and 1911, has enabled information that was previously undreamed of (take, for one simple instance, the case of Alfred H. Hunter) to become available.8 Vivien Igoe’s The Real People of Joyce’s “Ulysses” is the latest iteration of this ongoing project. Like the Benstocks before her, Igoe uses an alphabetical method to go through not only the characters in the book but many people who are just mentioned. Her range is very wide: the broad rubric “people” reaches as far as Garryowen, the Citizen’s dog (117-19). It includes such recondite figures as Madam Leggett Byrne (U 15.4042-43), Sir Timothy O’Brien (“Timothy of the battered naggin”—U 14.1441), and Mrs. Clyde Twelvetrees (U 12.1267-279)—a James Joyce Quarterly 56.1-2 2018-2019