James Joyce Centre Walking Tour, Dublin, Ireland

For anyone who has struggled to read his opus, Ulysses, it can be an insurmountable mountain to climb. But I came to Ireland to learn about Joyce’s early life. The natural place to start was this museum.

James Joyce Centre aims to be “the focal point for the worldwide celebration of James Joyce and as a destination for literary tourism, access to Georgian Dublin, and culture in Dublin city.”

I didn’t need to buy a United flight from Washington Dulles Airport to Dublin Airport to see James Joyce’s world.

Dublin is a world that readers of his novels know well. Whether it is the school steps that Stephen Dedalus bounds up in his Catholic secondary school in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or the turnabout that George Bloom crosses in front of St. George’s Church in Ulysses, Joyce paints an intimate portrait of the Dubliners who lived here in the 1900s.

But walking these actual Dublin streets could help me appreciate his writing in a new way as a writer.

So I booked the “Introducing Joyce’s Dublin” walking tour during my December trip to Dublin. Organized by the James Joyce Centre, it costs 15 curos for adults and 12 for students and seniors. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).