Typographical inconsistency in James Joyce's "Araby"

Question

Sorry if this a fussy question, but in teaching "Araby" I have found that there is an inconsistency between editions that must be a typo, but I can't figure out which version is correct. Just after the narrator reminds his uncle about giving him money for the bazaar, he says:

I felt the house in bad humour and walked slowly toward the school.

Or he says:

I left the house...

I've looked at about 8 different editions now, and they seem evenly split between "left" and "felt". Both work logically, but "left" flows more easily grammatically. "Felt" is more interesting though. Which one is correct?

Answer 1

Since “left” makes sense in context and “felt” does not, the simplest explanation is that the former is correct and the latter an error. The 1914 Grant Richards edition of Dubliners is available via the Internet Archive, and has “left”:

_{James Joyce (1914). ‘Araby’. In Dubliners, p. 38. London: Grant Richards.}

Robert Scholes, who edited the 1961 Viking “definitive text”, wrote:

With exceptions to be noted, the punctuation and spelling of the first edition published by Grant Richards in London in 1914 have been followed. Joyce read proof for this edition and made over a thousand corrections. Many of them were deletions of commas which the printer had added, but some were changes of wording. The Richards edition was the last version of his book to be revised by Joyce, and so is necessarily the basis of any later edition.

_{Richard Scholes (1961). ‘A note on the text’. In Dubliners, p. 5. New York: Viking.}

The 1961 edition also has “left” on p. 32.