A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published by B.W. Huebsch, New York, on 29 December 1916, in a first printing of approximately 750 copies priced at $1.50. The London edition (The Egoist Ltd, 1917) followed. The novel had been serialised in Harriet Shaw Weaver’s magazine The Egoist from February 1914 to September 1915. It was Joyce’s first novel — a radical reworking of an abandoned earlier manuscript, Stephen Hero (published posthumously in 1944), which told the same story in conventional naturalistic prose. The transformation from Stephen Hero to Portrait is one of the defining acts of literary modernism.
The Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows Stephen Dedalus from his earliest childhood memories (the moocow coming down the road, the warm and cold of wetting the bed) through his school years at Clongowes Wood and Belvedere College, his adolescent sexual awakening and subsequent religious crisis, his time at University College Dublin, and his final declaration of artistic and intellectual independence: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church.”
The novel’s great innovation is its style — which develops with Stephen’s consciousness. The opening pages are rendered in the simple, sensory language of infancy; the schoolboy sections in the choppy, competitive speech of boys; the religious section in the overheated rhetoric of Jesuit sermons; the university sections in the elaborate, self-conscious aesthetic philosophy of a young intellectual discovering his powers. Joyce invented the technique that Virginia Woolf would call “tunnelling” — the narration of consciousness from within, adapting its language to the developing mind it represents.
The hell-fire sermon in Chapter III — Father Arnall’s terrifying description of eternal damnation — is one of the great set pieces in English fiction: a virtuoso pastiche of Jesuit rhetoric that drives Stephen to temporary religious mania before he rejects the church entirely.
Significance
Portrait is the bridge between nineteenth-century fiction and modernism. It takes the Bildungsroman (the novel of education) and transforms it through the techniques of impressionism, stream of consciousness, and symbolic structure. Its influence runs through Woolf, Faulkner, and every subsequent novelist who has attempted to render consciousness from within rather than from without.
Stephen Dedalus reappears in Ulysses — older, more self-aware, humbled by failure — and the two novels form a diptych: the young artist’s declaration of independence in Portrait, and his day of reckoning with ordinary life in Ulysses.
Collecting A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
First edition (1916, B.W. Huebsch, New York): Approximately 750 copies, priced at $1.50.
Identification points:
- “Published December, 1916” on the copyright page
- Published by B.W. Huebsch
- Dark blue cloth boards
- No dust jacket is known for the first printing (jackets for later Huebsch printings exist)
First edition:
- Fine copy: $20,000–$50,000
- Near Fine: $10,000–$20,000
- Very Good: $5,000–$10,000
First UK edition (1917, The Egoist Ltd, London):
- Fine copy: $10,000–$25,000
- The Egoist edition is also very scarce — Harriet Shaw Weaver had difficulty finding printers willing to set type for it
Serialisation in The Egoist (1914–1915): Complete sets of the relevant issues are collected at $3,000–$8,000.
Signed copies: Extremely rare from this period. Joyce inscribed copies occasionally to friends and patrons (Weaver, Pound, Beach). These are among the most valuable items in modern literature: $100,000+.
Value trajectory (2016–2026): Approximately 2× for fine copies. The tiny first printing (750 copies) and Joyce’s supreme canonical status ensure permanent scarcity against permanent demand.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Stephen Dedalus really Joyce? Substantially. The novel follows Joyce’s biography closely — Clongowes, Belvedere, UCD, the rejection of church and nation. But Stephen is not identical to Joyce: he is more humourless, more self-regarding, and less capable of self-mockery. Joyce knew this — which is why Stephen appears in Ulysses as a figure partly mocked.
What does “Dedalus” mean? Daedalus was the mythological craftsman who built the Labyrinth and fashioned wings for himself and his son Icarus. Stephen claims the name as a symbol of artistic creation — the maker who escapes through craft. But Icarus fell.
Should I read this before Ulysses? It helps. Ulysses assumes knowledge of Stephen’s background, his family, his rejection of the church, and his relationship with his mother. Portrait provides this context.