{"id":12621,"date":"2023-11-12T13:59:28","date_gmt":"2023-11-12T13:59:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.summercamp.studyinireland.ie\/?p=12621"},"modified":"2023-11-20T11:14:46","modified_gmt":"2023-11-20T11:14:46","slug":"the-prestigious-school-that-hosts-isis-summer-camp-for-teenagers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.summercamp.studyinireland.ie\/ro\/the-prestigious-school-that-hosts-isis-summer-camp-for-teenagers\/","title":{"rendered":"\u0218coala de prestigiu care g\u0103zduie\u0219te tab\u0103ra de var\u0103 ISI pentru adolescen\u021bi"},"content":{"rendered":"
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James Joyce and Belvedere College (ISI Blog Post \u201cI\u201d):<\/pre>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t
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Did you know that James Joyce was educated at Belvedere College, the prestigious private school that hosts our English Summer Camp for Teenagers<\/a>, for no less than five of what were arguably the most formative years of his life? Joyce \u2014 who would go on to become a world-famous novelist of the modernist avant-garde, making Belvedere College renowned worldwide through his autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) \u2014 entered Belvedere in 1893 at the tender age of 11 and proved himself to be a very bright pupil there right up until his departure upon graduation in 1898 at the hardy age of 16. In a previous blog post<\/a>, we shed partial light on ISI\u2019s unique relationship \u2014 as an English school in Dublin \u2014 to this stalwart literary figure; universally acclaimed as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. In this blog post, part \u201cI\u201d of a very enlightening series of \u201cV\u201d, we want to enlighten you further by focusing on the rich religious heritage of Belvedere College \u2014 the base of our English Summer Camp in Dublin<\/a> \u2014 as well as Joyce\u2019s place, as but one of many famous alumni, within and beyond it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t
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\"James<\/div>
James Joyce dressed as the schoolmaster (seated, second row centre in \u201cmortar board\u201d academic cap) in the production of a school play, \u201cVice Versa,\u201d at Belvedere College, SJ, Dublin, 1898; contemporary photographs of Belvedere\u2019s prestigious campus.\n<\/figcaption>\n\t\t<\/figure>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t
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Writing to his lifelong partner, Nora Barnacle, on August 29 1904, James Joyce tersely confessed that he had left the Catholic church \u2014 \u201chating it most fervently\u201d \u2014 six years before. \u201cI found it impossible for me to remain [within] it,\u201d he ventures in this letter, \u201con account of the impulses of my nature. I made secret war upon it when I was a student and declined to accept the positions it offered me. By doing this I made myself a beggar but retained my pride. Now I make open war upon it by what I write and say and do.\u201d The Miltonic atmosphere that would pervade all of Joyce\u2019s writing, from Chamber Music <\/em>(1907) to Finnegans Wake <\/em>(1939), is perhaps nowhere better betokened than in this very letter which far from blithely betrays the Satanic sense of estrangement he maintained; cultivating it in exile and communicating it in his fiction: \u201cI cannot enter the social order [now],\u201d Joyce opined, \u201cexcept as a vagabond.\u201d<\/p>\n
1898, the year in which Joyce states he lost his faith, was when the young Dubliner left Belvedere College \u2014 a private, inner-city Catholic boys school under the trusteeship of the Society of Jesus. He had been a student there for five years. Prior to this, notwithstanding a brief hiatus with the Christian Brothers, which he chose never to remember in his writings, Joyce was educated at the Society\u2019 prestigious sister College, Clongowes Wood, in Salins, Co. Kildare. He entered there as a boarder on September 1 1888. When asked his age, the young Joyce replied that he was \u201chalf past six\u201d \u2014 a beguilingly innocent response that would for some time to come constitute his nickname at the College.<\/p>\n
In total, James Joyce was educated by the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits as they are less formally known, for the best part of fourteen years. For even when he left Belvedere in 1898, he went on to study at University College, Dublin: a Catholic institution which had been taken over by the Jesuits in 1883. There, Joyce would undertake a Bachelor of Arts degree, graduating in 1902. If Joyce retained anything from this lengthy education, it was, as his most esteemed \u201cbiografiend,\u201d Richard Ellmann, relays:<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t
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[A] conviction of the skill of his Jesuit masters, the more remarkable because he rejected their teaching. \u201cI don\u2019t think you will easily find anyone to equal them,\u201d he said long afterwards to the composer Philip Jarnach, and he corrected his friend Frank Budgen\u2019s book on him by remarking, \u201cYou allude to me as a Catholic. Now for the sake of precision and to get the correct contour on me, you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit.\u201d To the sculptor August Suter, who asked him what he retained from his Jesuit education, Joyce replied [in the manner of the 17th century French playwright Pierre Corneille, who had also received a rigorous education by the Jesuits], \u201cI have learnt to arrange things in such a way that they become easy to survey and to judge.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t
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Joyce entered Belvedere College on April 6 1893, to become its most famous \u201cOB\u201d (Old Boy or Old Belvederian, as its alumni are known). Due to his father\u2019s dwindling finances, he had been withdrawn from the more illustrious Clongowes Wood \u2014 \u201cwith its elms, large grounds, and storied (\u2026) medieval castle\u201d \u2014 in June 1891 and, in the interim, was sent, though not immediately, to the Christian Brothers in Dublin\u2019s inner-city North Richmond Street: a fact that Joyce is reticent to remember in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man <\/em>(1916); preferring instead to have his alter-ego, Stephen, pass this period in a \u201clong spell of leisure and liberty.\u201d This was Joyce\u2019s only break with Jesuit education, for like his father he was ultimately of the view \u201cthat the Jesuits were the gentlemen of Catholic education and the Christian Brothers . . . its drones.\u201d Having denounced the latter as \u201cPaddy Stink and Micky Mud\u201d in A Portrait<\/em>, Simon Dedalus, aka \u201cJohn Stanislaus Joyce,\u201d says to his wife in front of young Stephen:<\/p>\n
\u2014No, let him stick to the Jesuits in God\u2019s name since he began with them. They\u2019ll be of service to him in after years. Those are the fellows that can get you a position.<\/p>\n
\u2014And they\u2019re a very rich order, aren\u2019t they, Simon?<\/p>\n
\u2014Rather. They live well, I tell you. You saw their table at Clongowes. Fed up, by God, like gamecocks.<\/p>\n
This conversation, which takes place over the dinner table, recounts the very real occasion upon which a rather pleased John Joyce returned home to relay his fortunate encounter with one Father John Conmee, SJ, whilst walking along Mountjoy Street that day. Father Conmee had become Prefect of Studies at Belvedere College, having left the position of Rector of Clongowes two years before. Although not yet Provincial superior of the Jesuit Order in Ireland, which he would become in 1906, he was already very powerful. On learning that his former pupil was impelled to attend the Christian Brothers, and mindful of his academic ability, Father Conmee\u2019s benevolence was such that he immediately \u201coffered to arrange for James, and his brothers too, to attend the fine Jesuit day-school, Belvedere College, without fees.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is another instance relayed by Richard Ellmann which, though it did not make it into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man<\/em>, surely complements this one. It took place in 1895, two years into Joyce\u2019s education at Belvedere, when, having applied himself with great deliberation, he won a national academic prize for his performance in the national Intermediate Examinations. A direct result of this \u2014 his second such \u2014 victory, was that his father was called on one day by two Dominican priests who offered to provide James with free board, room, and tuition if he attended their school near Dublin. Leaving the decision to his son, John brought James into the room, whereupon, without hesitation \u2014 and echoing his father\u2019s prior proclamation \u2014 the young Joyce announced: \u201cI began with the Jesuits and I want to end with them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t
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\"Image<\/div>
Image of Belvedere House (artist unknown), circa Joyce\u2019s day; similarly, a photograph of Belvedere College\u2019s Finlay Building.\n<\/figcaption>\n\t\t<\/figure>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t
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When Joyce entered Belvedere in 1893 he found himself amidst luxurious surroundings and he revelled in the history of the House and its environs. If Clongowes Wood, with its subversive associations with rebellion had \u201croused its pupils to thoughts of grand action and great suffering,\u201d Belvedere, with its conspiratorial affiliations with crime and carnal passion, roused Joyce\u2019s thoughts to sovereignty and literary immortality. In Ulysses <\/em>(1922), in the opening section of \u201cWandering Rocks,\u201d he would draw upon some of his early research on the College \u2014 which Ellmannn notes, was \u201cto such good effect that a few years later he contemplated writing a small book about it\u201d \u2014 when he has Father Conmee walking along Malahide Road thinking \u201cof his little book Old Times in the Barony <\/em>and of the book that might be written about jesuit houses and of Mary Rochfort, daughter of lord Molesworth, first countess of Belvedere.\u201d In his stream of consciousness, we learn of \u201c[a] listless lady, no more young, walk[ing] along the shore of Lough Ennel, Mary, first countess of Belvedere, listlessly walking in the evening, not startled when an otter plunged. Who could know the truth? Not the jealous lord Belvedere and not her confessor if she had not committed adultery fully, . . . with her husband\u2019s brother?\u201d The history gradually de-veiled through this process of random thoughts and reminiscences, of \u201chalf confess[ions]\u201d and \u201ctyrannous incontinence,\u201d reveals a murky moment in the Belvedere family annals.<\/p>\n
Built in 1775 for the second Earl of Belvedere, George Rochfort, Belvedere House is allegedly one of the finest eighteenth-century houses in Dublin. Situated on Great Denmark Street in the north inner city, its design and decoration have alternately been attributed to\u00a0 Robert West and Michael Stapleton, both leading stucco craftsmen of the time. Its principal rooms were named Venus, Diana, and Apollo after deities whose presence was superseded but not effaced when the Jesuits acquired the building in 1841. At the time, one Father Bracken, SJ, wrote to the Father General in Rome: \u201cWe have acquired a large, beautiful house on a splendid site, such as may be worthy eventually to deserve the title of College, provided we can find the men for it.\u201d Find them they did, and to this impressive building the Jesuits added the adjoining house of Lord Fingall, which they purchased in 1884.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t
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\"Contemporary<\/div>
Contemporary photographs of the interior of Belvedere House with details of the fine stucco craftsmanship.\n<\/figcaption>\n\t\t<\/figure>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t
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So impressed was the young Joyce by the College buildings that \u2014 perhaps amidst the opulence, detecting an air of decadence \u2014 he set about investigating the history of the Belvedere family right away. The young Joyce was quite alone in his sleuthing, but then again, he did always maintain a lifelong interest in, and passion for, miscarriages of justice \u2014 as evinced quite comprehensively in Adrian Hardiman\u2019s 2017 book Joyce in Court: James Joyce and the Law. <\/em>What the young Joyce discovered about the Belvedere family was that Mary, wife of the first Earl of Belvedere, Robert Rochfort, was accused of having an affair with her husband\u2019s brother, Arthur, in 1743. As Ellmann notes, \u201c[t]the letters which were produced at the time were probably forged, but Lady Belvedere was induced to say she was guilty so as to be divorced from her debauched husband.\u201d However, such was the shame and stigma of a divorce in Ireland at the time, that it was too great for Robert to bear. Thus, instead of divorcing her, he cruelly set about imprisoning her at the family\u2019s property in Gaulstown, Co. Westmeath, where she continued to proclaim her innocence for the next thirty years.<\/p>\n
Though Mary repeatedly pleaded for release, Robert refused. He had his brother imprisoned too and, amidst his Gothic follies, lived a life of luxury and decadence right up until his death at the age of 66 \u2014 the cause of which is not clear; though spectacular accounts abound involving a midnight murder, a savage attack by wild dogs, and a less malicious rendition involving a lethal fall whilst on a \u201cmoonlit\u201d walk. In any case, the year, 1764, was when Mary was finally released \u2014 a frail, old, and scared woman who had lost everything (some say even her sanity). It is said that when she was freed she asked only \u201cis the tyrant dead?\u201d and spent the few remaining days she had at her daughter\u2019s home avowing her innocence on her death bed.<\/p>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t
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\"Mary<\/div>
Mary Rochfort, Lady Belvedere (artist unknown); image of Gaulstown House, Co. Westmeath, where she was imprisoned.\n<\/figcaption>\n\t\t<\/figure>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t
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\nDid you know that James Joyce referred to our ISI Meetinghouse Lane Campus in Ulysses (1922) as \u201cthe most historic spot in all Dublin<\/a>.\u201d . . . Read all about it in our previous blog<\/a> post!\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"James Joyce \u0219i Colegiul Belvedere (ISI Blog Post \"I\"): \u0218tia\u021bi c\u0103 James Joyce a fost educat la Belvedere College, prestigioasa \u0219coal\u0103 privat\u0103 care g\u0103zduie\u0219te tab\u0103ra noastr\u0103 de var\u0103 \u00een limba englez\u0103 ...","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12624,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-isi-dublin-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.summercamp.studyinireland.ie\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.summercamp.studyinireland.ie\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.summercamp.studyinireland.ie\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.summercamp.studyinireland.ie\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.summercamp.studyinireland.ie\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12621"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.summercamp.studyinireland.ie\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12630,"href":"https:\/\/www.summercamp.studyinireland.ie\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12621\/revisions\/12630"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.summercamp.studyinireland.ie\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.summercamp.studyinireland.ie\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.summercamp.studyinireland.ie\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.summercamp.studyinireland.ie\/ro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}