"When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years ... it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world." Thus Joyce wrote to his brother, and at the early age of twenty-five he completed Dubliners - a sequence of highly detailed episodes depicting middle-class Catholic life in Dublin. The frustrations of childhood, disappointments of adolescence and mystery of sexual awakening are related in the opening stories with clarity and sensitivity. In the most famous story, "The Dead", Joyce presents a Christmas gathering of friends and neighbours, but there is an underlying tension and sense of despair involved in the plot, which adds a disturbing clement to the superficial social scene. The realism and symbolic imagery of Dubliners created a startling new form of writing, which is as impressive today as when it first appeared in 1914.