He was the eldest of what his father, John Stanislaus Joyce, estimated as "sixteen or seventeen children," ten of whom survived infancy. By the time of his birth the fortunes of his father were already declining. Stephen Dedalus, the autobiographical hero of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was to describe his father as "a medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past." The description was an apt one of Joyce's own father, as well. His mother, Mary Jane (Murray) Joyce, seems to have been precisely the kind of calming influence John Joyce sorely needed; as James Joyce's biographer Richard Ellmann puts it, if John Joyce "was the principle of chaos, she was the principle of order to which he might cling."
In the fall of 1888, at age six, Joyce was enrolled as the youngest of the boarders at Clongowes Wood College, an academically sound Jesuit boarding school outside Dublin in Salins, County Kildare.
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