Clongowes Wood College

A Jesuit boarding school that has been described as "the Eton of Ireland."

James Stephen Atherton
Copyright (c) 1995 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A boys' preparatory school run by the Society of Jesus, located in County Kildare, west of Dublin. Founded in 1814 by the Rev. Peter Kenny, S.J., in Joyce's time Clongowes was considered the best Catholic school in Ireland. Joyce was six-and-a-half when he entered Clongowes in September 1888 as a boarder, and he remained a student there until June 1891. Joyce's fictional character Stephen Dedalus also attended the school as a boarder for a short time and, like Joyce himself, left when his family could no longer afford the fees. Some of Stephen's earliest childhood memories in A Portrait are of Clongowes and its "wide playgrounds . . . swarming with boys" (Portrait 8), and it is the setting for much of the action in chapter I.

Fargnoli, A. Nicholas, and Gillespie, Michael P., James Joyce A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work (New York: Facts On File, 1995), pp. 41-42.
Copyright (c) 1995 by A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael P. Gillespie

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Last updated: 25 February, 1997

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