Yet one more character from Dubliners—perhaps the most unlovely person in that gallery of human failures—enters the pages of Ulysses when Stephen runs into "John Corley" early in Eumaeus. In "Two Gallants," the work-averse Corley, known only by his surname, is seen un-gallantly preying on a servant girl, not so much for sex (though he gets that) as for money. In Eumaeus he is homeless, jobless, friendless, drunk, and still looking for sources of easy money. But the novel also incorporates him in a more dashing, successful guise. It is seldom remarked that Corley gave Joyce a model for the similarly despicable Blazes Boylan, whom Bloom calls "the worst man in Dublin."

Joyce said that the four stories in the second section of Dubliners represent "adolescence." Their protagonists are not teenagers but young men and women exploring life's possibilities, finding work, contemplating marriage. "Two Gallants" opens with two such men walking through town together. One of them is doing all the talking, while the other obsequiously listens and laughs, occasionally stepping into the street "owing to his companion's rudeness." The speaker tells him of "a fine tart" that he is seeing—a "slavey" who works in a house in Baggot Street, a rich area on the southeast side of town. He is having sex with this servant girl but has not told her his name. Representing himself as temporarily unemployed but "a bit of class," he has convinced her to pay the tram fares on their dates and to bring him "Cigarettes every night," as well as "two bloody fine cigars" clearly stolen from her employer.

These details mark the young woman as neither very bright nor very honest, but painfully desperate for affection. "Maybe she thinks you'll marry her," laughs Lenehan, who feigns moral outrage ("Base betrayer!") while congratulating his companion on a brilliant seduction ("You're what I call a gay Lothario...And the proper kind of a Lothario, too!").

Corley’s stride acknowledged the compliment. The swing of his burly body made his friend execute a few light skips from the path to the roadway and back again. Corley was the son of an inspector of police and he had inherited his father’s frame and gait. He walked with his hands by his sides, holding himself erect and swaying his head from side to side. His head was large, globular and oily; it sweated in all weathers; and his large round hat, set upon it sideways, looked like a bulb which had grown out of another. He always stared straight before him as if he were on parade and, when he wished to gaze after someone in the street, it was necessary for him to move his body from the hips. At present he was about town. Whenever any job was vacant a friend was always ready to give him the hard word. He was often to be seen walking with policemen in plain clothes, talking earnestly. He knew the inner side of all affairs and was fond of delivering final judgments. He spoke without listening to the speech of his companions. His conversation was mainly about himself: what he had said to such a person and what such a person had said to him and what he had said to settle the matter. When he reported these dialogues he aspirated the first letter of his name after the manner of Florentines.

Wandering around out of work—"about town"—Corley listens to friends who tell him about job openings, but such words are "hard" for a man who evidently prefers to have money simply handed to him. One source of income seems to be informing on fellow citizens to the secret police, and here here the apple has not fallen far from the tree. Eumaeus specifies that he is not simply the son of an "inspector," but of "Inspector Corley of the G division," notorious for its efforts to root out republicanism.

Corley pronounces the letter "c" with a burst of throaty air that makes it sound like "h," identifying him as a whore, and the story proceeds to show him also making money from the skillful marketing of his sexuality. Lenehan, jauntily dressed but impecunious and widely regarded as a "leech," anxiously asks more than once about an unspecified plan to get something from the girl. Corley assures him, "I know the way to get around her, man. She's a bit gone on me." He used to spend money on girls, he confides, but "damn the thing I ever got out of it—except with one woman, he admits "regretfully." She was "a bit of all right" but is now "on the turf"—earning a living as a prostitute—presumably after he ruined her reputation and then dumped her.

Corley is walking to meet the new girl for a date. He won't let Lenehan meet her, but agrees to let him observe her unseen. She is in her "Sunday finery": a blue dress, a white "sailor hat," a black leather belt with a great silver buckle, a white blouse, and "a short black jacket with mother-of-pearl buttons and a ragged black boa."  Some red flowers are "pinned in her bosom," and the air where she is standing is "heavily scented." Lenehan approves of "her stout short muscular body. Frank rude health glowed in her face, on her fat red cheeks and in her unabashed blue eyes. Her features were blunt. She had broad nostrils, a straggling mouth which lay open in a contented leer, and two projecting front teeth." Lenehan goes off to kill time, eat a miserably poor supper, and dream of settling down with "some good simple-minded girl with a little of the ready." At the end of the story, Corley walks back down the street with his date and says goodbye to her. To Lenehan, sick with fear that his plan has failed, he opens a hand to reveal a gold sovereign.

Not only does the pound coin suggest masculine rule, colonial degradation, and meretricious simony, but it is a phenomenal sum for such a poor girl to have given away—perhaps a quarter of her annual salary, or even more. (The apparent theft illustrates the thinking behind the "No followers" epression of Dublin employment ads: girl wanted, no dangerous males in tow.) History repeats itself when a well-oiled Corley begs money from Stephen in Eumaeus, complaining that he has "Not as much as a farthing to purchase a night's lodgings. His friends had all deserted him. Furthermore he had a row with Lenehan and called him to Stephen a mean bloody swab with a sprinkling of a number of other uncalledfor expressions. He was out of a job and implored of Stephen to tell him where on God's earth he could get something, anything at all, to do." Stephen tells him that in a day or two there will be an opening for a teacher at Mr. Deasy's school in Dalkey, even saying that "You may mention my name," but Corley begs off, saying that school was never his strong suit. Stephen gives him what he thinks is a penny but is actually a half crown, worth thirty times as much. Financial windfalls continue to visit this most unworthy man.

Little has changed from the time represented in "Two Gallants" except that Corley is now destitute, shuffling along dark deserted streets rather than strolling triumphantly down Baggott Street with a girl on his arm.  Some of his old dashing manner enters the pages of Ulysses in a different person, however. The Corley of Dubliners has "something of the conqueror" in his manner, one aspect of which is an air of not wanting a woman overmuch. He tells Lenehan, "I always let her wait a bit." Blazes Boylan plays the same role of a conquering Don Juan, attracting women with his air of affluence and confident unconcern. In Sirens he comes into the bar, orders a drink, and asks, "What time is that?... Four?" The assignation with Molly is set for 4:00, and Eccles Street is some distance away. Bloom thinks, "At four. Has he forgotten? Perhaps a trick. Not come: whet appetite. I couldn't do."

The surest sign that Joyce was thinking of Corley when he penned Boylan is the fact that Lenehan has transferred his sycophantishly leering attentions from the one to the other. He meets Boylan in the Ormond by prearrangement and hails him in the language applied to Corley: "See the conquering hero comes." They talk about betting on Sceptre in the Gold Cup and Boylan brags about his latest sexual adventure: "— I plunged a bit, said Boylan winking and drinking. Not on my own, you know. Fancy of a friend of mine." Ithaca and Penelope show that he has indeed placed a bet for Molly. That detail is not Corley-like, to be sure, but the leering complicity between Boylan and Lenehan absolutely recalls "Two Gallants." In Circe Lenehan "officiously detaches a long hair from Blazes Boylan’s coat shoulder" and congratulates him on a successful seduction, which Boylan complacently likens to nabbing a hearty meal:

LENEHAN

Ho! What do I here behold? Were you brushing the cobwebs off a few quims?

BOYLAN

(Sated, smiles.) Plucking a turkey.

LENEHAN

A good night’s work.

BOYLAN

(Holding up four thick bluntungulated fingers, winks.) Blazes Kate! Up to sample or your money back. (He holds out a forefinger.) Smell that.

LENEHAN

(Smells gleefully.) Ah! Lobster and mayonnaise. Ah!

ZOE AND FLORRY

(Laugh together.) Ha ha ha ha.

Corley apparently had a real-life model, but the correspondences are only partial. Vivien Igoe writes that "Joyce knew a Michael Corley who lived on the North Circular Road and met him on one of his trips to Dublin from Trieste when Corley wanted to borrow money from him. He reported that Corley was delighted to hear that he was in one of his stories." (Hah!) Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner add that "During his trip to Dublin in 1909, Joyce wrote to Stanislaus that Corley asked for money every time he saw him (Letters, vol. 2, p. 275)." This man, the only Michael Corley listed on the 1901 and 1911 census rolls, was born in 1850 and worked as a "commercial traveler." He died in a workhouse on 1 January 1916 and was buried in a pauper's grave in the Glasnevin cemetery.

Much as Joyce assigned bits of his Dubliners character to both John Corley and Blazes Boylan, it seems that he split Michael Corley into two persons. Like Michael, John Corley is a wandering mendicant heading for a bad end, but he is much younger. The name Michael is given to a fictional person better suited to the real man's age: the narrator of Eumaeus identifies John Corley's grandfather as "Patrick Michael Corley of New Ross."

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