Charles Wisdom Hely (1856-1929) was an Anglo-Irish
businessman who ran a stationery and print shop on fashionable
Dame Street. Joyce erred when he specified the address in Lestrygonians
as "85 Dame Street" and again in Ithaca as "89,
90, and 91 Dame street." As Gifford notes, there were no
such addresses on the street in 1904: the numbers ended at 81.
In James Joyce in the Nineteenth Century (2013),
edited by John Nash, John Strachan identifies the correct
address as 27-30 Dame Street (98). The wealthy Hely also made
money through a major investment in the pneumatic tyres
invented in Ireland in 1887 by Scotsman John Boyd Dunlop. He
lived with his wife Edith in a large gated house in the
southern suburb of Rathgar that he grandly called Oakland.
Hely was a busy socialite and also took on governmental
responsibilities. In Circe Bloom calls him "Mr
Wisdom Hely J. P.," i.e., Justice of the Peace.
In Hades, trying to remember who Bloom is, John Henry
Menton asks, "Wasn't he in the stationery line?" "Yes, he
was," Ned Lambert replies, "in Wisdom Hely's. A traveller
for blottingpaper." Bloom had much the same job then
that he now has at the Freeman's Journal: a traveling
salesman, he tramped about Dublin to drum up business. Later
in Hades Bloom thinks of Hely's as he ponders the
value of gramophones:
"Remind you of the voice like the photograph reminds you of
the face. Otherwise you couldn’t remember the face after
fifteen years, say. For instance who? For instance some fellow
that died when I was in Wisdom Hely’s." Has it been
about 15 years, then? The question is answered in Lestrygonians
when a string of men wearing sandwich-boards with the letters
H E L Y 'S approaches Bloom on Westmoreland Street, prompting
him to recall, "Got the job in Wisdom Hely’s year we
married." The Blooms were married on 8 October 1888, so
it has been 15 years and 8 months.
The novel suggests that Hely's was the place to go for
quality writing products. In Nausicaa Gerty Macdowell
cherishes the "violet ink that she bought in Hely’s of Dame
Street." In Sirens Bloom writes his letter to
Martha on "Two sheets cream vellum paper" that he
bought when he worked there, and Ithaca reveals that
his desk drawer contains "a butt of red partly liquefied
sealing wax, obtained from the stores department." But
Bloom's strongest response to this stationery shop is his
scorn for the way it advertises its products. The
ridiculousness of the sandwich-boards—"Y lagging behind drew a
chunk of bread from under his foreboard, crammed it into his
mouth and munched as he walked"—prompts some unusually
sustained criticism from him:
Doesn't bring in any business either. I suggested to
him about a transparent showcart with two smart girls sitting
inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blottingpaper. I
bet that would have caught on. Smart girls writing something
catch the eye at once. Everyone dying to know what she's
writing. Get twenty of them round you if you stare at nothing.
Have a finger in the pie. Women too. Curiosity. Pillar of
salt. Wouldn't have it of course because he didn't think of it
himself first. Or the inkbottle I suggested with a false stain
of black celluloid. His ideas for ads like Plumtree's potted
under the obituaries, cold meat department. You can't lick
'em. What? Our envelopes. Hello, Jones, where are you going?
Can't stop, Robinson, I am hastening to purchase the only
reliable inkeraser Kansell, sold by Hely's Ltd, 85 Dame
street. Well out of that ruck I am.
Of these contemptuous observations, Strachan remarks that
"The idea of the wealthy Anglo-Irish businessman Wisdom Hely,
Justice of the Peace, Committee Member of the Irish Automobile
Club and major shareholder in Dunlop Tyres, suggesting
bathetic advertising copy such as the Jones-Robinson dialogue
is comically unlikely and may possibly be intended as social
satire on a rich Protestant" (99). Nowhere in the entire novel
did Joyce give any personal particularity to Hely other than
his refusal to consider Bloom's idea for an ad "because he
didn't think of it himself."
Strachan observes that Hely's business was distinguished by
its "multifariousness, being stationers, printers, publishers,
and bookbinders. The company was a jobbing printers, but it
also published books (such as Irish Rural Life and
Industry (1907) and The 'Sinn Fein' Revolt,
Illustrated (1916)), trade periodicals (the Journal
of the Institute of Bankers in Ireland, for instance),
posters (many First World War recruitment posters were printed
at Hely's) and thousands of postcards, the majority on Irish
themes. Its premises sold numerous stationery
products—diaries, fountain pens, scrapbooks, photograph
albums—for the home, alongside commercial
stationery—bill-heads, deposit slips and ledger books for the
office—as well as wedding accoutrements. However, the
advertisements for Hely's which appeared in the first decade
of the twentieth century see the company starting to resemble
a Turkish bazaar, with a range of goods made at its Acme
workshop (at nearby Dame Court), which were available at its
large premises on Dame Street: cigarette cases, wrist bags,
bridge sets, even carpets, linoleum and underlining, and the
sporting guns used in the hunting of which the proprietor" was
very fond (98-99).