Like much of French’s diverse oeuvre, including his exceptionally clever nursery rhymes rewritten in the style of the classical poets so, too, The Jarvey (January 1889-January 1891) has never been mined by historians or Joyceans. It is forgotten today that French did a large amount of literary work, much of it in The Jarvey, which runs to 1,700 pages. The word ‘ethel’ crops up in corruptions all over the Wake. Since I wrote the book, I decoded another clencher in the portmanteau word in the last three lines of Finnegans Wake ‘Bussoftlhee’ which unscrambles as the ‘Buss of ethel,’ The ‘Kiss of Ethel.’ Ethel was French’s tragic first wife, so active on The Jarvey.

French parodied numerous Moore’s melodies mainly in The Jarvey and they act as codebreakers and signifiers throughout the rest of the Wake:įrench can be considered the singular Finnegan of the cosmic Finnegans of Joyce’s final novel. Highly critical of Percy’s carelessness in matters financial and the impact of that on his family, she died in 1935 and did not live to know that French was actually owed a fortune in royalties when he died and, the fraction that was restored to his family in the 1940s was sufficient for their lasting material comfort. Emily is critically candid that despite being a celebrity her brother died in poverty and, this is reflected in Joyce’s corruption ‘Liverpoor’. There can be little doubt that Joyce acquired a copy of Chronicles and Poems of Percy French by French’s sister Emily, published two years after French’s sudden death in 1920 in Liverpool. When I went about the task of including a short chapter on how Joyce used Percy French’s ballads in a general biography on the shockingly overlooked Percy French, little did I know that it would draw me into the most obscurely difficult book ever written and alter the course of my research dramatically, but a series of clues and suspicions, which would escape people without an in-depth knowledge of French, that he dominates Joyce’s final novel led me inexorably into the tortuous labyrinth of Finnegans Wake and, in the end, there were more reference than I could include but, when I stumbled upon the reference at the end of Chapter 3 to the passing of a giant at Liverpool, juxtaposed with two of Moore’s melodies, this was a Eureka moment.

James joyce wake