‘After God Shakespeare has created most’, says John Eglinton in Ulysses, echoing Dumas fils (or is it Dumas père?). Among the select band of writers of English who can legitimately be named ‘after Shakespeare’ are two whose peculiar province was the modern city. They are comic and visionary writers, powerfully aware both of the plasticity of words and of the mass and texture of things. They are so individual that their work defies direct comparison, though it makes a suggestive initial contrast. They are Joyce and Dickens.

Dickens needed the actual physical input of London or, as he put it, of ‘streets’ to fuel his writing. Joyce, living in exile, told a friend that ‘I want … to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book’. We can get some idea of the intensity of Dickens's imagination from his remark that ‘I don't invent it – really do not – but see it, and write it down’. G. H. Lewes remembered him stating that ‘every word said by his characters was distinctly heard by him’. There is evidence that Joyce, too, may have heard the voices that resound in his books. Imaginary voices are prominent in his two most directly autobiographical works, the Portrait of the Artist and Exiles.