1914 · Grant Richards, London · 15 stories
Read Dubliners online: all fifteen stories, timed so you know which one fits tonight
Read Dubliners by James Joyce online, free, in the text of the June 1914 first edition. Every story has its own reading time at 238 words a minute. The shortest takes eight minutes. The last one, “The Dead”, takes an hour and six.
- Words
- about 68,900
- Whole book
- 289 min
- Stories
- 15
- Proofed against
- 1914 first edition
- Price
- Free to read; packs quoted on request
The timing table
Fifteen Dubliners stories, minute by minute
Joyce ordered the book from childhood to public life, so the first three stories are told by a boy and the last one is a Christmas party full of adults. You can read them out of order. Most readers shouldn’t on a first pass. Times are word counts from our text divided by 238, rounded to the nearest minute.
| No. | Story | Words | Minutes | Stage of life |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | The Sisters | 3,120 | 13 | Childhood |
| 02 | An Encounter | 3,380 | 14 | Childhood |
| 03 | Araby | 2,620 | 11 | Childhood |
| 04 | Eveline | 1,830 | 8 | Adolescence |
| 05 | After the Race | 2,450 | 10 | Adolescence |
| 06 | Two Gallants | 3,940 | 17 | Adolescence |
| 07 | The Boarding House | 3,000 | 13 | Adolescence |
| 08 | A Little Cloud | 4,850 | 20 | Maturity |
| 09 | Counterparts | 4,300 | 18 | Maturity |
| 10 | Clay | 2,700 | 11 | Maturity |
| 11 | A Painful Case | 3,550 | 15 | Maturity |
| 12 | Ivy Day in the Committee Room | 5,300 | 22 | Public life |
| 13 | A Mother | 4,300 | 18 | Public life |
| 14 | Grace | 7,850 | 33 | Public life |
| 15 | The Dead | 15,700 | 66 | Coda |
Read chapter one online
The first page of “The Sisters”
There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse.
James Joyce, “The Sisters”, Dubliners, London: Grant Richards, 1914, p. 1.
Editor’s note: which Dubliners you are reading
Dubliners took nine years to reach print. Grant Richards signed it in 1906, then took fright at the word “bloody” and a pub scene, and Joyce fought printers and two publishers until Richards finally issued it in June 1914. That first edition is the one we proofed against, page by page, from a scanned copy.
One choice you will notice. Joyce hated inverted commas and wanted dialogue opened with a dash. The 1914 printers set quotation marks anyway, and later editors restored his dashes. We keep the 1914 marks, because that is the book people bought and read for fifty years. A note at the head of each story says so. If you are teaching from a modern Penguin or Norton, the words match; the punctuation around speech won’t.
Hiberno-English stays as printed. “Says he” is not a typo. Place names are left in their 1914 spellings and glossed once in the margin: Adam and Eve’s, the Pigeon House, Kingstown, which is Dún Laoghaire now.
Content notes
A predatory older man in “An Encounter”. Domestic violence against a child at the end of “Counterparts”. A suicide reported in a newspaper in “A Painful Case”. Heavy drinking throughout. Nothing is softened, and no story is cut.
- 2023-04-11Restored a line break between Mrs Mooney and Polly that our first pass had run together. Two speakers were reading as one. “The Boarding House”, 1914 p. 76
- 2023-06-02
Mr KernansMr Kernan’s. An apostrophe lost in conversion. “Grace”, 1914 p. 196 - 2023-09-19Reinstated the song verses in “Ivy Day” as indented lines, matching the first edition’s setting. Content unchanged. “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”, 1914 pp. 162–164
- 2024-01-08
snow was general all over Ireland,snow was general all over Ireland. A reader in Oregon caught it. Full stop restored. “The Dead”, 1914 p. 278
Before you pick it for a group
Is Dubliners a good first Joyce for a book club?
Yes, and it is the only Joyce most clubs finish. The prose is plain. Nothing happens in half the stories, and that is the point. Groups who want plot should pick O. Henry instead.
Can we read only “The Dead”?
You can, in about 66 minutes. It lands harder after the other fourteen. A pack can split it across two meetings with “Araby” and “Eveline” as a warm-up.
Is the online text really free?
Yes. Dubliners has been in the US public domain for decades. No account, no sign-up. You pay nothing unless you ask us for a printed or digital group pack, and that is quoted by email before anything is made.
Group packs · quoted on request
Dubliners packs for book clubs and classes
A pack sets out the fifteen stories across your meetings, with discussion questions per story and the gloss notes. Printed, large print or digital. Tell us how many readers and when you meet, and the correspondent writes back with a quote. There is no cart.