Decoding Dedalus: Christfox in Leather Trews

This is a post in a series called Decoding Dedalus where I take a passage of Ulysses and break it down line by line.

The line below comes from “Scylla and Charybdis,” the ninth episode of Ulysses. It appears on page p.193 in my copy (1990 Vintage International). We’ll be looking at the passage that begins “Christfox in leather trews…” and ends “narrow grave and unforgiven.”

In “Scylla and Charybdis,” Stephen Dedalus finds himself waging an intellectual battle in the National Library. Stephen argues that to truly understand Hamlet, it is paramount to also understand Shakespeare’s biography. His audience of literary elites is not having it, with one gentle exception. Head librarian Thomas Lyster, though he doesn’t seem totally won over by Stephen’s thesis, is unfailingly kind and polite to Stephen. While the others discuss the guest list of a poetry party to which Stephen hasn’t been invited, Lyster turns the focus back to Stephen, asking him questions about his Shakespeare theory. Rather than feeling heartened by Lyster’s polite inquiry, Stephen feels apprehensive, even suspicious, thinking, “Courtesy or an inward light?” in response to the librarian's probing.

It’s natural to be a bit put off if one suspects their audience is merely humoring them, but the phrase “inward light” reveals an additional hue to Stephen’s wariness. Lyster is a member of the Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, one of whose central beliefs is that all humans contain an inward light, allowing anyone the potential of Christlike perfection. Inwardly, Stephen dashes off one of the more puzzling passages in “Scylla and Charybdis”:

“Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks, from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices, bully tapsters’ wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place a slack dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow grave and unforgiven.”

If we pull apart Stephen’s stream of consciousness, we find a surprisingly thorough summation of some of the tenets of Quakerism, as laid out in the journal of its founder George Fox. Let’s take a look, line by line:

“Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks, from hue and cry.”

The epithet “Christfox” that opens this paragraph refers to George Fox himself. Scholar F.L. Radford wrote that this holy portmanteau is meant to capture Fox’s general messianic vibe along with unfounded accusations that Fox claimed to be Christ. It also alludes to Fox’s heretical notion that man can reach the perfection of Christ while on Earth, that whole “inward light” thing. Radford fretted in his article about Lyster and Fox that too many “explicators” of Ulysses emphasize the Shakespearean allusions in the passage, but that really and truly, this is all about Fox and Quakerism. He argued that in the passage that begins “Christfox…” and ends “Fox and geese”, there are no direct allusions to Shakespeare at all, while there are very specific and precise allusions to The Journal of George Fox. This isn’t to say there aren’t secondary meanings packed into this paragraph; that’s what Ulysses is all about, after all. We’ll take a look at some of those before we finish, but we should take a closer look at the dominance of Fox's Journal first.

Lest things get too high-minded, Stephen pivots to a sartorial critique of Fox’s odd fashion sense - those leather trews. “Trews” are form-fitting trousers that are traditionally part of Scottish highland dress. They often come in a tartan pattern, though Fox opted for leather. Fox did indeed go around in form-fitting, homemade leather trousers, which was apparently a peculiar look for the late 17th century. In his Journal, Fox wrote that his imminent arrival might be heralded as, “The Man in Leathern Breeches is come.”

Radford felt the term “runaway” didn’t really apply to Fox, who was far more assertive, shall we say. According to Radford, Fox would often engage his critics in “aggressive religious dispute,” even if they had, say, threatened to arrest him if he were to continue to do so. Real debate bro energy. I do think, contrary to what Radford asserted, that this phrase is one reason other commentators connect this passage to Shakespeare, who is interpreted as running away from his wife Anne. The assumption was that the Immortal Bard couldn’t stand Anne so he left her in Stratford with the kids and lived it up as a famous playwright in London.

The “blighted tree forks” bit applies to Fox rather than Shakespeare, though. From Fox’s Journal:

“I fasted much, and walked abroad in solitary Places many Days, and often took my Bible, and went and sate [sic] in hollow Trees, and lonesome Places, till Night came on.”

As far as I’m aware, this was not Shakespeare’s scene.

Radford points out that Joyce’s usage of the phrase “hue and cry” was not arbitrary. He believed it to be an allusion to a passage in Fox’s Journal describing a 1655 incident during which Fox was confronted “with a Hue and Cry from a Justice of the Peace” regarding false accusations made against him.

Our passage continues:

“Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices, bully tapsters’ wives. Fox and geese.”

The “no vixen” line is a play on Fox’s name. Though he did eventually marry, he rejected marriage in favor of the search for wisdom in his younger years. As Fox put it in his Journal, “I… often walked solitary in the Chace….” It might sound contradictory at first, then, to state that he also “won women to him,” but Fox’s teachings were indeed quite popular with women. I think this is due in no small part to the fact that Fox held the radical notion that women had souls, just like men.

Shocking, I know.

Fox wrote in 1646, “... I met with a sort of People, that held, Women have no Souls… no more than a Goose.” This would account for the phrase “Fox and geese.” This juxtaposition seems to imply that Fox had some immoral intentions for his female converts, like a fox might have ill intentions for geese. Stephen is applying his usual irreverence to his musings on Quakers.

Radford found the phrase “a whore of Bablyon” to be one of the more difficult to parse bits in this passage. He believes this is a reference to Fox’s anti-scholarly bias. Fox objected to preachers and priests who took their inspiration from their studies rather than their lived experience. Fox recounts once winning over one such scholar and spoke of it in terms of defeating a whore and a beast, so this may be what Joyce is driving at here, as many of the allusions in this passage are approximate rather than precise quotes. This line also describes the diversity of women Fox “won to him.” The inclusion of the whore of Babylon once more implies a prurient interest on Fox’s part in these ensouled geese. This would allow him to overlap metempsychotically with Shakespeare, who would have experienced similar temptations after leaving bucolic Stratford and entering Babylon (aka London).

The last bit of Stephen’s thought-stream is directly about Anne Shakespeare:

“And in New Place a slack dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow grave and unforgiven.”

Here, Stephen strays back to thoughts of the Bard and his final residence in Stratford: New Place. He imagines Anne withering away into a near-dead hag while Will lived it up in Babylon. Shakespeare spent the vast majority of his time away in London once he hit it big in theater. It’s likely that he returned home more frequently than Stephen argues in his descriptions of Anne and Will’s relationship elsewhere in this episode, but he did indeed travel far and wide, as did George Fox.

The only remaining mystery, then, is why include this at all?

On one level, this passage adds George Fox to the ever-expanding pantheon of metempsychotic presences in Ulysses. Scholar Daniel Schwarz, in his book Reading Joyce’s Ulysses, argues that the “Christfox” passage not only combines Fox and Christ with Shakespeare, but also adds a little Charles Stewart Parnell for good measure. We can see how Shakespeare’s biography intermingles seamlessly and somewhat ambiguously with Fox’s in this passage, but where does Parnell enter the picture? Well you see, Parnell used the pseudonym “Mr. Fox” during his love affair with Katherine O’Shea. Thus, we have two overlapping Mr. Foxes in this passage. Schwarz argues this jumble of historical figures can be arrange into an apostolic succession like the one found in “Proteus”:

“God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain.”

In Schwarz’s interpretation, this new succession would run:

“God becomes Christ becomes Shakespeare becomes Parnell becomes Stephen Dedalus.”

These men are Stephen’s spiritual progenitors, men who were often misunderstood by the people of their own time, sometimes to their own destruction. Shakespeare only fits this description if you believe that his wife Anne was an evil sex monster. While this story is probably not historically true, it fits the narrative Stephen is crafting for himself, so Shakespeare makes the list. Stephen finds himself the inheritor of this lofty lineage, while at the same time trying to bury his own past like the fox burying his grandmother in his riddle back in “Nestor.” Stephen feels his calling as an Artist is being stymied by the other men in the Library, which brings us back to the quaker librarian himself, Thomas Lyster.

There’s a spitefulness in Stephen’s suspicion of Lyster, who is unfailingly kind and decent to Stephen, the other literary men, and the library patrons he ducks out to serve throughout their conversation. Stephen may be turned off by Lyster’s religion, perhaps revealing a bit of religious bigotry on Stephen’s part. Stephen (and by extension, Joyce) reveals a deeper familiarity with Fox’s Journal than one might expect. This passage reminds me most of Stephen’s parodies of theosophy. He is annoyed with Æ and Eglinton, and so he silently deprecates their belief system, but betrays his own depth of knowledge in the process. So, Stephen hates a lot of stuff, but in an erudite way.

Of course, Thomas Lyster was a real man who Joyce knew in his youth, and like so many other real people who wound up in Ulysses, Joyce’s portrayal of him was neither flattering nor especially accurate. Radford wrote that one reason for the precision in Joyce’s quotations from Fox’s Journal was so that he could employ that same precision in lampooning Lyster, with his religion as a focus. Lyster was well known to many of Joyce’s contemporaries (folks such as Constatine Curran, Padraic Colum, Oliver St. John Gogarty, and John F. Byrne), and their impressions of Lyster are completely at odds with Joyce’s portrayal. They tended to see Lyster as incredibly dedicated to his profession and possessed of a deep passion for literature. Radford calls Lyster a “paragon of librarians” and emphasizes that he deserved the large memorial plaque in his honor still on display outside the National Library’s Reading Room.

Thomas Lyster memorial plaque, July 2024

None of these other contemporaries recall Lyster’s quakerism being a dominant part of his personality, but it is overwhelmingly how he is identified in Ulysses. He is described in terms of his religions fourteen times in “Scylla and Charybdis” and twice more in “Circe.” It seems excessive. Imagine if Bloom were repeatedly referred to as “the Jew canvasser.” You might start to wonder about the author’s intentions.

Lyster’s professional zeal is also reduced to absurdity in “Scylla and Charybdis”; his dedication to his patrons is minimized, in Radford’s words, to “an obsequious desire to please” and his cultural passion is transformed into a mere “parroting of secondhand opinions.” The Lyster of Ulysses is indeed a kind and tender man, but he doesn’t offer much substance to the debate about Hamlet. Radford believes this is why Joyce threw in that obscure “whore of Babylon” remark in the Christfox passage, as it marks the Quaker librarian as inherently unscholarly, just as Fox was, in sharp contrast to the demands of his vocation. All four of the men that Stephen spars with in the Library were real intellectuals who Joyce carried grudges against. Portraying Lyster as unintellectual allows Stephen to position himself as Lyster’s intellectual superior and his polite questions as mere pandering. None of this is fair on Joyce’s part.

Given that this is the Shakespeare episode, Joyce adds a little period-appropriate flavor to his parody. Lyster is consistently associated with Elizabethan dances such as the sinkapace (cinquepace), galliard, and coranto. Those specific dances are associated with the comedic character Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night. Sir Andrew is foolish and none too bright, often pretending to know more about culture than he does. Lyster’s dancelike movements would put him at odds with ol’ George Fox who didn’t care much for dance as it “stirred up People’s Minds to Vanity.” It implies that Lyster’s piety may be surface-level only, much like his interest in literature.

Elsewhere in “Scylla and Charybdis,” Lyster is referred to as a “baldpink lollard costard,” another archaic insult hurled at the undeserving librarian. While George Fox had lots of hair, Lyster was bald, once again somehow falling short of his religious forebear. The Lollards were another anti-clerical sect that held some similar doctrines to Fox, though there was no direct relationship between the Lollards and Quakers. Perhaps since Lyster is portrayed as missing the mark at being a Quaker, he is somehow a Lollard? Costard is the meanest bit here, and also the most directly Shakespearean. “Costard” is an archaic English term for a particularly large apple, so you can work out how this is an insult for the follicly challenged. “Costard” is also the name of another Shakespearean fool, this time from Love’s Labour's Lost. Costard is more of the “says the things no one else can” type of fool, contrasted with the vain and silly Aguecheek. The throughline of all these allusions is that Lyster is nice but shallow, a fool of some sort, inconsistent in his faith, and to top it all off, bald.

Radford has some insight into why Joyce would come down so hard on this otherwise upstanding citizen. He recounts a story that originated with Joyce’s friend John F. Byrne (the model for Cranly) in which Joyce and Byrne were goofing off in the Reading Room. Joyce laughed a bit too loudly, disturbing the silent atmosphere, and Lyster asked him to leave until he could compose himself. This seems like such a minor incident that it boggles the mind that Joyce would even remember it into adulthood, much less care enough to slander Lyster in his novel over it. I’ll admit I got into trouble with librarians as a kid for being noisy as well, and I have somehow emerged into adulthood unscathed. I’m no James Joyce, though. Radford explains, “A small incident to be sure, but Joyce was capable of rendering acquaintances uncomfortably immortal for less.” The incident is also referenced in both Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, although in the latter case it’s Cranly who is too loud, not Stephen. So there. I for one find it extremely funny that we as readers of Joyce have spent the last hundred years trying to puzzle out this odd, obscure passage, and it turns out to be a relic of the pettiest grudge ever.

Decoding Dedalus: Christfox in Leather Trews

Further Reading:

Decoding Dedalus: Entelechy, Form of Forms