For nine years, James Joyce struggled to make ends meet as publisher after publisher rejected what is now considered one of the greatest collections of short stories ever assembled. Belfast journalist Michael Collins looks at the story behind Dubliners, which finally saw the light of day 100 years ago this week

JAMES Joyce wrote the majority of Dubliners in Trieste, in 1905, just one year after his self-imposed exile from Ireland. His first major work was composed, by his own admission, "in a style of scrupulous meanness". He attributed this to the Trieste heat, complaining of working "while the sweat streamed down my face on to the handkerchief".

In reality it was more than just the Mediterranean climate that stirred up resentment and anger in Joyce's pen. He was embittered by the state of Irish society at the turn of the last century; a period which he considered to be of stagnation and "paralysis".

Ireland at this time languished culturally and economically under British rule and the infrastructure of Dublin had fallen into disrepair. Corroding Georgian architecture and monuments from British colonialism formed the landscape of the Irish capital. Buildings like the Four Courts and Trinity College were blackening with age and in their deterioration stood like symbols of an ailing empire.

Dublin's prosperous districts were abandoned by its middle classes and the city's slums soon extended far beyond the back alleys. Once-prosperous neighbourhoods became filthy, overcrowded and disease-ridden ghettos.

Joyce depicted these scenes of colonial poverty in the Dubliners story A Little Cloud when Chandler walks the streets to meet Ignatius Gallaher. He emerges "from the feudal arch of the King's Inns" where "a horde of grimy children populated the street" and picks his way through the "minute vermin-like life under the shadow of the gaunt spectral mansions in which the old nobility of Dublin had roistered".

Writing with such realism about inner-city Dublin stood Joyce in stark contrast to other Irish writers of his day. Well established figures such as WB Yeats and Lady Gregory neglected to portray the realities of life in Dublin, instead devoting their energies to the Irish Literary Revival, a movement which found artistic expression through folklore and romanticised notions of the Irish peasantry. For Joyce, this was nothing but "ill-informed, formless caricature" and signified a step backwards for Irish literature. For him a story like two Two Gallants, a tale of two vagabonds who coerce some money out of an aristocrat's maid and wander Dublin's streets aimlessly in the hope of procuring a drink, was much more reflective of contemporary Ireland and represented a more progressive form of literature.

He argued: "Two Gallants - with the Sunday crowds and the harp in Kildare Street and Lenehan - is an Irish landscape."

The marked difference between Joyce and his contemporaries was expressed famously when he told Yeats during their first meeting: "I have met you too late. You are too old." Yeats described the charismatic 20-year-old as "A young poet, who wrote excellently, but had the worst manners".

Despite this, the two had a huge amount of respect for each other and Yeats, acknowledging Joyce's talents, helped him by recommending him to publishers.

In this area Joyce needed all the help he could get. Despite having completed Dubliners in 1905 it would be another nine years before his collection of 15 short stories found their way to a bookshop shelf.

Joyce's unflinching realism and controversial satire led him into conflict with over 40 publishers who feared libel charges and public uproar. Objections ranged from the petty and unwarranted, such as use of Dublin pub names, to the perfectly understandable given the period in which he was writing.

It was a time when the authority of the Catholic Church was still hugely influential over Irish state and society. For Joyce, a self-confessed socialist, the Church's influence was a stranglehold which was morally and culturally repressive. He resolved to wage war against it through literature.

This is evident in Dubliners from the story Counterparts. The tale follows Farringinton, a man defined by his anger with mundane circumstance, who drowns his frustration in alcohol and returns home to beat his son with a shillelagh. The boy pleads with him: "I'll say a Hail Mary for you, pa, if you don't beat me". Many of Joyce's publishers refused to print such sentences and argued they contained anti-Irish sentiments. Joyce was dismayed, professing to one: "It is not my fault the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs around my stories. I seriously believe you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one look at themselves in my finely polished looking glass."

Joyce's reflection of an Irish people suppressed by repetitive routines and trapped in circles of monotonous frustration made uncomfortable viewing for some publishers. For nine years he struggled to make ends meet while a work now regarded as one of the greatest collections of short stories ever assembled lay unrecognised in his desktop drawer.

He took up jobs in admin and teaching as a means to sustain himself and his family and continuously borrowed money from family members to put food on the table. Poor living conditions and a confined domestic situation fuelled Joyce's frustrations.

In one moment of anger and disillusionment he threw the unfinished manuscript of his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, into a burning fire. Luckily its scorched pages were saved by his sister Eileen who was living with Joyce at the time. He thanked her, acknowledging there were "pages here I could never have rewritten".

Over the course of nine frustrating years he chopped and changed Dubliners to appease publishers. He omitted six uses of the word bloody from his original text despite believing that without such swear words the book was "like an egg without salt".

He even did the unthinkable and wrote to King George V, seeking his approval, after a publisher warned him of referring to the queen mother as "that bloody old bitch of a mother" in Ivy Day at the Committee Room.

If not for the help of established writers like Yeats and Ezra Pound, who understood Joyce's importance as an artist, Dubliners might never have been published. When it was finally released this week in 1914, Yeats said that it showed "the promise of a great novelist and a great novelist of a new kind".

Today, 100 years on, Dubliners remains as highly acclaimed and relevant as ever.

It is impossible to read it without feeling an affinity for the city of it's setting, and at the same time, it is impossible, having read the book, to walk Dublin's streets without feeling a special connection to the most famous Dubliner of them all -

James Joyce.