Who was the real Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell?

“Dubliners were proud of Endymion. They were proud that they tolerated Endymion, but also that he tolerated them. Most people watched him and remembered him with affection, and only a few were aware of the darker side to some of his mutterings.” - John Simpson

This post is a part of an occasional series on the real people behind the characters in Ulysses.

While Bloom is talking his friend Mrs. Breen in “Lestrygonians”, the eighth episode of Ulysses, they are interrupted by a figure bustling past:

“A bony form strode along the curbstone from the river staring with a rapt gaze into the sunlight through a heavystringed glass. Tight as a skullpiece a tiny hat gripped his head. From his arm a folded dustcoat, a stick and an umbrella dangled to his stride.”

The man is a harmless, local eccentric who Bloom identifies as Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell. Bloom is familiar with his idiosyncrasies, alerting Mrs. Breen that CBOFTF always walks on the outside of lamp posts. Caution is wise in this case, as we see later in “Wandering Rocks” that CBOFTF deviates from his path for no one, not even for the blind stripling:

“As he strode past Mr Bloom’s dental windows the sway of his dustcoat brushed rudely from its angle a slender tapping cane and swept onwards, having buffeted a thewless body. The blind stripling turned his sickly face after the striding form.
—God’s curse on you, he said sourly, whoever you are! You’re blinder nor I am, you bitch’s bastard!”

CBOFTF pops up intermittently throughout the course of Ulysses. In “Lestrygonians”, he serves as a harbinger for a possible dark future for Mr Breen. In fairness to CBOFTF, he doesn’t seem to share Breen’s intense paranoia and mania. Instead, CBOFTF confidently skates through the streets of Dublin with a stride of purpose and an agenda known only to himself. Apart from the blind stripling, he is largely tolerated by his fellow citizens. Stuart Gilbert, in his book Ulysses: A Study, includes CBOFTF in his list of peristaltic movements found in “Lestrygonians”, viewing him merely as an example of the technic of “Lestrygonians”. References in Joyce scholarship to CBOFTF are few and far between. Like so many Ulysses characters, CBOFTF is based on a real person, and he appears more than once in the pages of the novel. Who was he, really?

CBOFTF’s real-world counterpart was known as Endymion to Dubliners in the early 20th century. Like CBOFTF in Ulysses, he was part of the “street furniture” of the city. Everyone recognized him, but very few truly knew him. Legends surround his mystique to this day, and his antics were written up in the newspapers in his own time. Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann said that Joyce included Endymion in Ulysses as a comedic flourish. Given Endymion’s ubiquity, it seems that a depiction of Edwardian Dublin without him would be like a home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat - incomplete.

Joyce wasn’t the only Dublin writer to include Endymion in their prose, either. Oliver St. John Gogarty, Joyce’s model for Buck Mulligan, wrote about the myth of Dublin’s Endymion in his memoir As I Was Going Down Sackville St. Although he rhapsodizes warmly about Endymion, Gogarty was a notoriously unreliable narrator. Some of the stories I’ve seen repeated about Endymion in more recent works seem to originate in Gogarty’s memoir, and as such, I think are best taken with a grain of salt. The best source I’ve found for Endymion’s biographical information is a paper from the Dublin James Joyce Journal by scholar John Simpson, who relies on primary sources such as contemporary newspaper articles and Endymion’s own correspondence. However, Endymion is both a legend and a real person. It may not be totally possible to separate the legend and the capital “T” Truth about him, and, honestly, that’s probably fine.

Like many legends, Endymion has a tragic origin story. Born James Henry Farrell the day after Bloomsday 1851 to a prominent Dundalk family, Simpson notes that he “enjoyed a regular middle-class childhood.” Farrell grew up to take a fairly ordinary civil service job as an excise officer. Then, calamity struck. Legend has it that one of Farrell’s colleagues fell into a brewery vessel, and Farrell dove in to save him, grievously injuring himself in the process. Due to his injuries, Farrell could no longer sustain his job and could never work again. However, according to a lawsuit that Farrell later filed against the distillery (not brewery), in reality, he fell down a ladder and into a vault “in consequence of the want of proper arrangements.” So, no dramatic rescue, just a health and safety violation.

Regardless of the circumstances, Farrell’s mental health deteriorated following the accident. Reading between the lines, I would guess that Farrell sustained a severe head trauma that brought on his condition, but this is never specified in the literature. His brother had him committed around this time to the Richmond Lunatic Asylum, which greatly upset Farrell. He would also attempt to sue his brother for illegally committing him. It makes me wonder if Farrell was behaving in a way that alarmed his family but he himself found totally reasonable. Interestingly, Farrell unsuccessfully sued the distillery and his brother for the sum of £10,000 each, the same amount that Denis Breen is attempting to sue for in Ulysses. I’m unaware if Joyce knew this detail, but it does create a more pronounced overlap of Breen and CBOFTF in Ulysses if he did.

Farrell would have been known as “Endymion” by other Dubliners, though he is never referred to as such in Ulysses. Gogarty tells the name’s origin story in Sackville St.:

“... when his doctor told him that his mental disability was likely to become progressive, but that he would never be violently unbalanced, he remarked: ‘Endymion, whom the moon loved: a lunatic….’”

In order to verify this story, we have to believe that Gogarty was privy to Farrell’s conversations with his doctor, so again, grain of salt. According to Simpson, though, Farrell began appending “Endymion” to his name in his correspondence, so there may be a kernel of truth here. Like his Joycean counterpart, Endymion also self-applied a lofty list of surnames. Simpson tracks the progression of Endymion’s ever-evolving array of names, and it seems he never settled on one set in particular. The longest list was dated to 1889 - J. H. Oliver Cashel Fitzsymons Farrell. Notably, Farrell often included Cashel and FitzSymons (though spelling on this one varied) among his names as these were other prominent Dundalk families from which he claimed descent. Tisdall, which he also used under various spellings, seems to be similar in origin. “Boyle” was his mother’s birth name. Joyce seems to have added O’Connor and Fitzmaurice, as Farrell never used these names.

In Sackville St., Gogarty and a friend follow Endymion into the National Library in order to check the signature book and learn his real name:

“We turned to the desk. In the Signature Book, spreading fully in purple pencil across a page, was the signature of Endymion. It read, to our amazement:
James Boyle Tisdell Burke Stewart Fitzsimons Farrell”

There’s crossover with Joyce’s fictionalized name (I assume that Gogarty’s account is also fictionalized), but it’s not known that Farrell ever adopted Burke or Stewart into his many names. I would guess that both Joyce and Gogarty found humor in the incongruity of such an odd character affecting an aristocratic list of names and embellished it for comedic effect rather than strict accuracy.

In addition to their names, Endymion and CBOFTF were also notable for their distinct fashion sense. From “Wandering Rocks”:

“Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell walked as far as Mr Lewis Werner’s cheerful windows, then turned and strode back along Merrion square, his stickumbrelladustcoat dangling.”

In “Lestrygonians”, he wears a hat “tight as a skullpiece.” He’s also described as “staring with a rapt gaze into the sunlight through a heavystringed glass.” In “Wandering Rocks”, he’s seen staring “through a fierce eyeglass across the carriages at the head of Mr M. E. Solomons in the window of the Austro-Hungarian viceconsulate.” Finally, in “Circe”, Lipoti Virag appears wearing a brown mackintosh and “the monocle of Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell.” Given the earlier descriptions, I had pictured a pocket-sized spyglass rather than a monocle, but a monocle certainly fits CBOFTF’s aristocratic pretensions.

Endymion, with “his stickumbrelladustcoat dangling”

Gogarty goes into much deeper description of Endymion’s sartorial flair, noting his “tailcoat over white cricket trousers” and “a black bowler some sizes too small.” In Ulysses, CBOFTF is seen carrying his umbrella and “fierce eyeglass”, but his counterpart Endymion was more prone to carrying swords. Some accounts also mention a fishing rod or umbrella, but the swords seem consistent. The too-small hat is consistent as well; Ellmann claims that it had holes added for “ventilation,” though this feels a little too mythical for me. Vivian Igoe in The Real People of Joyce’s Ulysses tells how Endymion would salute the Ballast Office clock (the same one Bloom checks in “Lestrygonians”) with his swords. She also recounts how he would stand before the clock, set a large alarm clock and then walk away with the clock ringing in his pocket. Both of these stories seem to originate in Gogarty’s memoir, so while they are quirky and compelling, I have to take them with a grain of salt. In some sense, their strict truth doesn’t matter, because like all enduring legends, the tale of Endymion has grown through retelling and sharing. He feels like someone who might salute a clock with a sword. The cold, hard fact matters less as his reality fades into folklore.

One consistent detail about Endymion is that he loved the National Library. In Ulysses, his presence is noted in “Scylla and Charybdis”:

“The constant readers’ room. In the readers’ book Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell parafes his polysyllables.”

Gogarty’s anecdote in Sackville St. revolves around Endymion in the National Library, as well. Simpson writes that while Endymion did indeed frequent the library, his presence wasn’t always benign. In 1906, Librarian Thomas Lyster and Assistant Librarian William Kirkpatrick Magee wrote to each other in concern about Endymion intimidating female patrons of the library. He would step in front of them, blocking their path, and gesture “in an odd offensive way.” It’s not clear what the outcome of the situation was, but they both note that Endymion was “of respectable antecedents” and “usually well behaved in the Library.”

Little is known of Endymion’s later years. He appeared in the 1911 census at age 60, living in a boarding house in Dublin. He was classified as an “idiot” on the census. Simpson notes the word “imbecile” had been crossed out and replaced with “idiot.” Gogarty took an interest in Endymion, and his landlady would call on Gogarty when there was a problem. Endymion’s life after 1912, including when and where he died, is unknown, though Simpson cites a remark in the Irish Times that Gogarty had looked after him at the end of his life.

Endymion’s legacy lives on in the 21st century mainly through the continued popularity of Ulysses. A question that lingers for me is whether we’re laughing at Endymion or actually embracing him as one of Dublin’s own. In Ulysses, I think Ellmann is correct; CBOFTF is just a bit of spice thrown in. I think he was a colorful memory for Joyce but not much more. Gogarty portrayed Endymion as a sort of secret philosopher - he seems insane, but he’s actually the wisest among us. This portrayal can come across condescending, especially in Gogarty’s style, and Endymion never gets to speak for himself in Gogarty’s memoir. On the other hand, it seems that Gogarty cared about him enough to show up in his life. The newspapers liked to write up Endymion’s odd presence at society gatherings in the late 19th century for the sheer spectacle, but, at the same time, he seemed to have been tolerated by his fellow Dubliners. I didn’t read any accounts of Endymion being harassed by law enforcement or institutionalized beyond a brief period in 1870’s. Though I think his life was hard at times, Endymion at least was able to live out his life as he saw fit.

Who was the real Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell?

Further Reading:

The Women of Ulysses: Lizzie Twigg

U.P: Up