“It’s for an invalid”

From the “Wandering Rocks” episode. Blazes Boylan is supervising the preparation of a gift basket to be delivered to Molly Bloom, whom he will visit that afternoon.

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

A few notes:

~ Thornton’s: fruiterer and florist, “a very fashionable shop” (Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated).

~ “Fat pears,” “ripe shamefaced peaches”: Boylan would have no trouble understanding the language of emoji. In the “Ithaca” espiode we find a description of the remains of this gift: “an oval wicker basket bedded with fibre and containing one Jersey pear, a halfempty bottle of William Gilbey and Co’s white invalid port, half disrobed of its swathe of coralpink tissue paper.”

~ What’s in the jar? Apparently it’s Plumtree’s Potted Meat, flakes of which are found in the Blooms’ bed.

~ The OCA reader will have seen H.E.L.Y’s in a passage from “Lestrygonians.”

~ The “darkbacked figure”: Leopold Bloom.

~ “Invalid port”: a fortified wine. “Es un excelente reconstituyente,” says a webpage I found somewhere. Molly is of course not an invalid.

We last see Boylan in his small section of this episode with a red carnation between his smiling teeth. He takes it from a stem glass and asks the shopgirl if it’s for him.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)