A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Following the novel's serialisation in The Egoist in the preceding year, British publishers were hesitant to take it on for fear of prosecution under the obscenity laws therefore this edition precedes the first English one by two months and even then, the latter was published using the American sheets in February 1917.

'Stephen Dedalus describes his spiritual journey through his Jesuit education and petty bourgeois Dublin to forge through "silence, exile and cunning" the "uncreated conscience of his race".' [and] ' Following close on Dubliners (for it appeared through 1915 as a serial in The Egoist) The Portrait can be read either as an autobiography or a novel. A landmark in sensibility, the prose moves forward in complexity from the child's sensations at the beginning to the adolescent subtleties at the end' (Connolly, p. 33).

First edition, first printing; 8vo; small bookseller's sticker to rear paste down, light tape ghostiing to endpapers from an early protective wrapper, bookplate to front paste down; publisher's blue cloth, titles to upper board in blind and to spine gilt, spine just a little rolled but an unusually nice copy and uncommon thus; housed in a green cloth folding box.

Slocum and Cahoon A11; Connolly 26.