Although in "Oxen" the characters are Irish, Dubliners, their voices are distorted through the stylistic channels of established writers in English. This is a textual event that shows how Dublin is overshadowed by the imperial capital and how Joyce constructs the "Oxen" narrative upon the literary London scaffold. The majority of the authors of the anthologies themselves lived in London, the imperial cultural centre, and were distinguished specifically as London authors: for example, Defoe, Pepys and Evelyn, Bunyan, Dickens. Even though some of the chosen authors are Irish, they became associated with London because they worked and published there, as in the case of Swift, Burke or Goldsmith. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that a great number of the extracts that comprise Peacock's anthology are about London. Characteristically, Pepys' diary entries are about the Great Plague and the Great Fire, and Evelyn's diary entries refer to the Great Fire and the Great Frost; Defoe's refers to the Plague, too; Steele (a Dubliner) and Addison's articles for The Spectator are London chronicles; Walpole's extract is entitled "On Living in London" and eulogises the imperial metropolis; Goldsmith's "National Prejudice" is a report on Englishness "supposed to have been written in London by a Chinese" (Peacock, 1911: 229); De Quincey's extract refers to a dream set in Oxford Street "by lamplight" (Peacock, 1911: 312); the "Great Cockney" (Joyce, 2000: 183-4), Dickens, is present through a textual sample from David Copperfield.

<6> The majority of the authors of the Anthologies themselves have lived in London, the imperial cultural centre and have been distinguished as London authors: Defoe, Pepys and Evelyn, Bunyan, Dickens. Even though some of the chosen authors are Irish, they became associated with London because they worked and published there, as in the case of Swift, Burke or Goldsmith. Furthermore, it is significant that a great number of the extracts that comprise Peacock's Anthology are about London. Characteristically, Pepys' diary entries are about the Great Plague and the Great Fire and Evelyn's diary entries refer to the Great Fire and the Great Frost; Defoe's refers to the Plague, too; Steele and Addison's articles for The Spectator are London chronicles; Walpole's extract is entitled "On Living in London" and eulogises the imperial metropolis; Goldsmith's "National Prejudice" is a report on Englishness "supposed to have been written in London by a Chinese (Peacock, 1911: 229); De Quincey's extract refers to a dream set in Oxford Street "by lamplight" (Peacock, 1911: 312); even the "Great Cockney" (Joyce, 2000: 183-4), Dickens, is present through a textual sample from David Copperfield.

<7> At this point, I would like to discuss the genre of anthology that Joyce used as scaffold in order to define the style of the fourteenth episode of Ulysses. Why did Joyce decide to become an editor of an anthology of English Literature? This appears to contradict his famous statement that the main source of his talent was his "revolt against the English conventions, literary and otherwise." "I don't write in English," his Irish compatriot Arthur Power reports (O'Connor, 1967: 107). Andrew Gibson remarks that: "the tradition of English literature is less important for understanding 'Oxen' than a knowledge of the politics of the anthology itself in the period 1880-1920" (Gibson, 2002:173). Most interestingly, Gibson draws on Esther Quantrill's argument in her Anthological Politics 1860-1914 (1995) that "the anthology was 'one of the principal instruments' by which national identity was increasingly invested in the literary tradition" (Gibson, 2002:174). Both at home and in the colonies educational programmes promoted a global cultural homogeneity that intended to sustain the Pax Brittanica. As cultural historians explain, English cultural nationalism of the 1880-1920 period propagated "a softening of political and religious divisions that had marked the first half of the [nineteenth] century" (Collini, 1991: 347) and that "had appeared to marginalize particular ethnic and social groups" (Dodd, 1986: 1). Characteristically, Saintsbury in his anthology directly relates the development of English writing with the empowerment of the English throne (Saintsbury, 1912: 56). Taking the above historical conjunctures into consideration, it would be more elucidating for the reader of the "Oxen" episode to read the text as an "anti-anthology" (Gibson, 2002: 182), "a sly corruption of the tradition as promoted by the anthology and its supposed historical shape" (Gibson, 2002: 180).

<8> I am going to focus on the final mongrelised passage at the end of "Oxen", because its linguistic jumble reacts to and problematises the spatial dimensions of a colony. In this way, I intend to demonstrate how London and Dublin become interconnected through colonised voices: on the one hand, Pidgin, nigger, Irish and Scots, which point to colonised spaces and, on the other, Cockney, which points to the "other within", the "colonised" lowest classes of the imperial capital, the synecdoche for the empire.

<9> In "Oxen" the social conflict both in Ireland and in Britain is understood through textual conflict: the imperial version of culture is juxtaposed with working class culture. Joyce's simulation of Carlyle's style signifies the epilogue of such a tour de force in explorations of the stylistics of English prose masters. Hence, in the parody of Carlyle, the whole episode is defined as a "chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle" (U 554). Moreover, it marks a gulf, between the rational Englishness and the cultural and linguistic melange that follows in the "frightful jumble of Pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel" (Joyce, 1966: 138-49). Carlyle's moral writings are interconnected with the farraginous final extract that voices London's popular culture. In Peacock's anthology (Peacock, 1911: 330-9) one of the three extracts representing Carlyle is from Past and Present (1843). In this, Carlyle addressed the huge socio-economic gulf that defined the Victorian society, despairing of the harsh British reality that "in the midst of plethoric plenty, the people perish" (Keating, 1976: 11).

<10> Five years later, in 1848, in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (produced in London) Marx and Engels, having both witnessed as London residents the development of the British labour movement, distinguished "the two great hostile camps, two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat" (Keating, 1976: 11-2). Although for Marxism class conflict was a prerequisite for social revolution, for social moralists, such as Carlyle, the dispossessed "mutinous" denizens of the London Abyss required interventional and functional treatment through education and charity. The strategy employed to fulfil the culturalisation and inevitable political assimilation of London's other was "colonisation" (Doyle, 1989: 30). During the 1880s and 1890s the colonisers entered Unknown England, the Terra Incognita of the East End. The social explorers organised 'settlements' (Doyle, 1989:19) such as Toynbee Hall (1884) and the Oxford House (1884). The philanthropic programme of the latter regarded "colonisation by the well-to-do ... the true solution to the East End question" in order "to make the masses realise their spiritual and social solidarity with the rest of the capital and the kingdom" (Doyle, 1989: 30). Moreover, Toynbee's declaration to the inhabitants of Bethnal Green, "You have to forgive us for we have wronged you," (Ackroyd, 2001: 679) recalls the Anglo-Irish Oxonian Haines' apology to the Irish Stephen in the first episode of Ulysses: "We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame" (U 24). These two statements epitomise the rhetoric of the British colonisers of the time, regardless of whether their audience was in London or Dublin.

<11> Joyce's first visit to London was initiated through literature and the publishing market. The London Fortnightly Review printed Joyce's article on Ibsen, in April 1900, and Joyce, remunerated, travelled with his father John Stanislaus to London, staying in a boarding house in Kennington, a cheap part of the conurbation. But Joyce perhaps chose the particular London quarter for its literary significance, because Kennington for Joyce meant William Blake. Joyce wished to walk Blake's 'charter'd streets,' in order to experience the imperial capital (Jackson, Costello, 1997: 224).

<12> The collection of Joyce's Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings (2000) demonstrates not only his pungency as critic and political commentator, but also how thoroughly he examined the historico-political contexts of literature and how he perceived Irish history and culture in contradistinction to British. For instance, in his 1912 Trieste lecture on Blake, Joyce elucidates the political and cultural network in which Blake was enmeshed: Blake wore the Phrygian red cap in the streets of London, "the emblem of the new age" and was a "member of the literary-revolutionary coterie that included Miss Wollstonecraft and the ... author of the Rights of Man, Thomas Paine" (Joyce, 2000: 175). Furthermore, Joyce admired Blake's works because they constituted visionary engravings of "an entire sociological system". He cites as example Blake's poem "London" (1794), in which the sigh of the unhappy soldier runs down the wall of "Buckingham Palace ... as a drop of blood" (Joyce, 2000: 175). Blake, thus, represented for Joyce a model of an artist as cartographer of a city's stratifications and history.

<13> London as new territory should not have been that unfamiliar for Joyce since a great number of Dublin streets and places were named after London, the imperial metropolis. This imposition of London on Dublin cartography is a further indication of London overshadowing Dublin. Characteristically:

Dublin bore the imprint of the English city. There were familiar placenames such as Smithfield, Pimlico, Ely Place, Apothecaries Hall, Mecklenburgh Street, Holles Street, Essex Street, Belgrave Square, Constitution Hill, Mansion House, Sackville Street, Waterloo Road, Fleet Street, and Temple Bar, Grafton Street, Duke Street, Gloucester Road, Mount Street, Ranelagh, Henrietta Street, Little Britain, the Bridewell-and even London Bridge. Joyce knew that Dublin had never been fully an Irish city. (McGinley, 2001: 1)