Cast 85: page 638, line 1356.
Im sure hes very distinguished Id like to meet a man like that God not those other ruck besides hes young those fine young men I could see down in Margate strand bathingplace from the side of the rock standing up in the sun naked like a God or something and then plunging into the sea with them why arent all men like that
This is from Episode 18. The final episode is Molly Bloom’s interior monologue: a vast unpunctuated flow of words, divided into eight enormous sentences. This passage comes near the end of the seventh.
Here Molly is thinking about Stephen, the novel’s other central figure. Bloom brought Stephen home with him earlier that night. Stephen has already left, and Molly never actually meets him, but in Episode 17 Bloom has told her about him in bed.
Which event or person emerged as the salient point of his narration?
Stephen Dedalus, professor and author.
（U605.2269）
Margate is a seaside resort town on the northeastern edge of Kent, in England.
As for resorts in Britain, they almost always meant waterside resorts. These came in two forms: inland spas and seaside bathing resorts. During the Industrial Revolution, the character of the resort changed dramatically in Britain. One major shift was that popularity turned, almost as if the table had rotated, from spas to seaside bathing places.
(Akio Kawashima, “Resort Cities and Leisure,” in The Back Alleys of the British Empire, Heibonsha Library, 2022)
The first modern seaside resort in the world to emerge in this way was Brighton. Margate was one of the many seaside resort towns that followed. Saint Anne’s-on-Sea, which appeared in Cast 76, was another.
After the Bourbon Restoration in 1815, aristocrats and royals who had spent time exiled in England returned to France, bringing back with them the new habits and customs they had learned there. (Shigeru Kashima, “The Birth of the Seaside Resort,” in The Back Alleys of the British Empire, Chuko Bunko, 2003.) That is said to have been the beginning of the French seaside resort, the world that later becomes the setting of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower in Proust.
Margate is mentioned several times in Ulysses.
In Episode 8, after lunch, Bloom fantasizes about taking Molly on a trip to English seaside resorts such as Brighton and Margate.
Tour the south then. What about English wateringplaces? Brighton, Margate. Piers by moonlight. Her voice floating out. Those lovely seaside girls.
（U148.1065）
In Episode 16, Bloom sees a postcard shown to him by a sailor and begins to fantasize again about future travel. This seems like an extension of the earlier daydream. Margate is one of the places he imagines.
Another thing just struck him as a by no means bad notion was he might have a gaze around on the spot to see about trying to make arrangements about a concert tour of summer music embracing the most prominent pleasure resorts, Margate with mixed bathing and firstrate hydros and spas, Eastbourne, Scarborough, Margate and so on, beautiful Bournemouth, the Channel islands and similar bijou spots, which might prove highly remunerative.
（U512.519）
A spa, in the strict sense, is an inland resort based around mineral or thermal waters, like Bath, and I do not think Margate belongs to that category. So this is probably one of the characteristic “wrong details” of Episode 16.
Bloom does not sound as though he himself has ever been to Margate. So perhaps Molly visited it with someone before her marriage. Bloom, not knowing that, later fantasizes about taking her there himself. And then, only here, we realize it. That may be one of the small hidden mechanisms of the novel.
"The jetty, Margate, Kent, England, ca. 1897" by trialsanderrors is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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