Jasmine Mulliken is Digital Production Associate at Stanford University Press. Prior to that she spent five years as Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. She has a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and specializes in 20th-Century British Literature, Digital Humanities, and Digital Literacies.
Although the word “water” is only mentioned once, there is a kind of fluidity seeping through the landscape of “An Encounter.” Based partly on an experience shared by James Joyce and his brother Stanislaus, the story chronicles a day’s truancy for the narrator and his friend Mahony who, instead of going to school, wander Dublin, observing the city’s workers, non-school-going children, and eventually its seedier inhabitants as represented by the josser.
[The Dodder River, Dublin], photographed by Robert French between 1880 and 1900, made available by the National Library of Ireland as part of the Lawrence Photograph Collection.Over the course of their journey they encounter several bodies of water, including the three largest rivers in Dublin: the Liffey, the Tolka, and the Dodder. The boys start at the Royal Canal, which runs around the city’s general perimeter north of the Liffey. Then they walk up to the Tolka and follow its south bank until they reach the area of the Liffey ‘s docks. The Tolka issues into the Dublin Bay north of the Liffey, but the boys turn southward toward the larger river. They cross the Liffey on a ferryboat, the narrator gazing out toward the Irish Sea, and then wander through Ringsend, finally settling on a sloping bank near the Dodder:
“We both felt rather tired and when we reached the field we made at once for a sloping bank over the ridge of which we could see the Dodder” (24).
The Dodder happens to figure rather erotically in Joyce’s own experiences with Nora, explains Chester Anderson in his “Joyce’s Letters and His Use of ‘Place’.” According to letters, Joyce questions Nora about her relationship with a friend of his whom she “went with…down to the bank of the Dodder.” Joyce then demands:
“Tell me. When you were in that field near the Dodder . . . were you lying down when you kissed? Did you place your hand on him as you did on me in the dark . . .?” (Letters II 232)
Anderson notes also that “in one of the portions of the letter of December 3, 1909, which is not printed in Ellmann’s text, Joyce writes in great detail (in order to excite himself and Nora) about their first sexual act five years before ‘at Ringsend,’ when, he says, he ‘came off’ through her fingers” (qtd. in Anderson 69). Anderson even suggests that “the ‘queer old josser’ (pidgin English for God) is both the Dublin god and one image of the self of the narrator as he might become in Dublin.”
Thus, a story that begins as a partial reference to Joyce’s childhood ends with a much more maturely tinged reference to his sexual life. This autobiographical fluidity of reference adds yet another example of the transition from childhood to adolescence which already figures in the story. And geographically, the transition takes the form of waters flowing toward the Liffey: the Royal Canal from the north side of the Liffey, where all the childhood stories take place or at least begin, and the Dodder from the south, where childhood innocence is challenged by less familiar images and ideas, in this story as well as in “Araby.”
In “Eveline,” the title character has the chance to leave Dublin with Frank, her love, to his new home in Buenos Ayres. In the story, she weighs the pros and cons of leaving her father and siblings and a hard life of working and caretaking for the exciting unknown of a new country where she will be free to establish a new identity as Frank’s “Poppens.”
Paseo Colon, Buenos Aires, photographed in 1915. The photo is from a historic lecture booklet with the description “On leaving the docks and driving up into the city, the visitor is at once impressed with the fact that Buenos Aires is not so wholly wrapped up in the purely material as is our commercial center on Lack Michigan. It has broadened along more aesthetic lines and is cultivating the graces, not alone the sordid features, of cosmopolitanism. In the newer parts, the buildings and shaded boulevards and beautifully landscaped parks resemble rather those of Paris; although it is not behind our own big cites in public utilities.” Photo is part of the Visual Instruction Department Lantern Slides Collection at the University of Oregon, http://oregondigital.org/u?/archives,3953
The city, which is the capital of Argentina, is named three times in the story:
“She was to go away with him by the night-boat to be his wife and to live with him in Buenos Ayres where he had a home waiting for her” (38).
“He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres, he said, and had come over to the old country just for a holiday” (39).
“If she went, tomorrow she would be on the sea with Frank, steaming towards Buenos Ayres” (40).
The city is alluring to her, exotic and promising, yet it also stirs up trepidation. When, at the end of the story, she’s faced with boarding the ship, “all the seas of the world tumble[…] about her heart” and she fears that “[Frank] would drown her” (41). She grasps the railing and does not board. She seems to fear not only the uncertainty of a future with Frank but also the expanse of the globe.
Though the common spelling of the city’s name is “Buenos Aires,” Joyce’s alternate spelling draws attention to the etymology of the name, which is derived from Our Lady of Buen Ayre (“fair winds”), which would guide the sailors coming and going from this port city. Not only is the city’s name a fortuitous one for a sailor like Frank, the city itself was also a popular emigration destination for Europeans from 1850 to 1914. According to Sidney Freshbach’s JJQ article “‘Fallen on His Feet in Buenos Ayres’ (D 39): Frank in ‘Eveline,'” the year Joyce wrote the story, “an economic boom began, lasting till 1912, and, for the decade 1901-1910, migration shot up again to 12,585” (224). Eveline has the chance to become just one of many Europeans, which included the Irish, that made a fresh start in the thriving South American city.
Yet for better or for worse, she chooses not to go. Contradicting the example set by other characters in the story like the priest who had moved to Melbourne and her neighbors, the Waters, who had moved to England, Eveline decides in a moment not “to go away like the others, to leave her home” (37).
The South Circular was, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, essentially the southern border of Dublin. Most of the development along the road was residential and took place in the 19th century. As an outer-edge area, it would have been a somewhat less expensive, yet newer, more attractive, nearly suburban place to live for many families, and it appears to be the locale of several of Corley’s old flames in “Two Gallants:”
“–First I used to go with the girls, you know, said Corley, unbosoming; girls off the South Circular. I used to take them out, man, on the tram somewhere and pay the tram or take them to a band or a play at the theatre or buy them chocolate and sweets or something that way. I used to spend money on them right enough, he added, in a convincing tone, as if he were conscious of being disbelieved” (52).
Wellington Barracks, photographed by Robert French between 1887 and 1914. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland’s Lawrence Photograph Collection.
Don Gifford notes that the road “was a popular promenade for groups of unattached lower-middle-class young women” (58). The girls on the South Circular would most likely be young women, perhaps very like Eveline, living at home with their parents, perhaps inexperienced at romance and gullible to the “charms” of someone like Corley. Yet even after he spent money on pampering them, only one, who “was…a bit of all right” (53) gave him anything in return for his troubles. And she, according to Corley, later became a prostitute.
This photograph, from the Griffith College website, shows a “[v]iew of bomb damage on the South Circular Road, January 1941, taken from behind the Griffith Barracks’ railings. (Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland).”Although taken in January 1941 after it was bombed, the photograph above shows a row of residences in South Circular Road, which are representative of the types of buildings that lined the street.
It’s also worth noting that in Ulysses, we learn that Bloom would wander along the South Circular Road, between Leonard’s Corner and Synge Street, with Owen Goldberg and Cecil Turnbull in 1884. The area around Portobello and the South Circular was home, in fact, to many Jews who had left Lithuania in the nineteenth century.
North Wall, the site of ships arriving and departing in Dublin, features in both “Eveline” and “A Little Cloud” as a place of frustrated dreams for their main characters. It’s where Eveline watches Frank set out for yet another adventure without her and where Little Chandler, eight years prior to the story’s setting, watches his friend Gallaher set off for a life he would come to envy. The place reference begins the story of “A Little Cloud” and begins the final movement of “Eveline:”
“Eight years before he had seen his friend off at the North Wall and wished him godspeed” (“ALC” 70).
“She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the passage over and over again.” (“E” 40)
In both cases, the main characters are contrasted with someone who gets to leave, and the fact that they have stayed or must stay in Dublin is the source of their paralysis. Their Dublin responsibilities, while offering a certain level of comfort, are also their bindings. The North Wall, which offers some the chance to escape, is yet another unassailable boundary for the likes of Eveline and Little Chandler.
The National Railway Museum has digitized this photo from its collections with the following description: “Sailing ships and steam passenger ferries at North Wall docks, Dublin, about 1906.”
North Wall can refer to the general area north of the Liffey and east of the canal or the North Wall Quay which spans the north wall of the Liffey from the Custom House to East Wall. In the case of both stories, it would seem to refer to the docks from which ships sailed, which are indeed along the quay. The photo above is from the National Railway Museum and shows “[s]ailing ships and steam passenger ferries at North Wall docks, Dublin, about 1906.” Many of the ships that would dock here would take their passengers to Liverpool or Holyhead. From there, they could travel anywhere in the world.
The Wharf Road appears in “An Encounter” as one of the first streets along the narrator and Mahony’s long route through Dublin the day they skip school in search of adventure. After Mahoney arrives at the Canal bridge where his friend our narrator has been waiting, the two “walked along the North Strand Road till [they] came to the Vitriol Works and then turned to the right along the Wharf Road” (22). Originally, they had “arranged to go along the Wharf Road until [they] came to the ships, then to cross in the ferryboat and walk out to see the Pigeon House” (21), but after they cross the Liffey and wander around Ringsend for a bit, they decide against the Pigeon House. They do trek along the Wharf Road all the way to the river, though, and have several encounters with other children and adults on the way.
Section of the 1883 Letts, Son & Co. Plan of the City of Dublin” map in David Rumsey’s online map collection. The road bordering the sea is the part of Wharf Road the boys traverse.
The Wharf Road, now East Wall Road, is a road that runs along the top of the wall built to keep the River Tolka on course on its way to the sea so that it doesn’t flood the city’s northern-eastern neighborhoods and industrial complexes. First, on the section of the Wharf Road that runs northwest to south-east, the boys encounter several children. Mahoney plays Indian and “chase[s] a crowd of ragged girls” (22). The boys are then accosted with stones and taunts by two other smaller boys defending the girls. Their siege against the other boys fails and they move on.
The picture, right, shows, toward the top, the part of the road that runs north-west to south-east, and then, along the right edge of the map, the section of the road that runs north and south just before it meets the Liffey. This is the part of the road where the boys begin “walking about the noisy streets flanked by high stone walls, watching the working of cranes and engines and often being shouted at for [their] immobility by the drivers of groaning carts” (22-23). Thus they move from navigating adversarial children to navigating adversarial adults (though they admit they incite the adversity), even before they cross the Liffey into the section of the city where the josser awaits. In this way, the Wharf Road represents a kind of microcosmic progression of the move from childhood to maturity that the story illustrates in a broader sense.
At the same time, the Wharf Road may also represent the technology and ability to control nature. The story contains references to several bodies of water. The canal, first, is a highly controlled body that the boys cross via a bridge. Then they approach the Tolka and stay well above it by way of the massive wall that keeps it en route to the sea. Once they reach the Liffey, larger than the Tolka though also fairly controlled by walls, they traverse it on a ferry, admitting the river a certain level of power not given to the waters they had navigated by dry bridge and road. The sea is described from a safe distance, though with an adventurous mystique as the narrator imagines the vast geography of the world beyond the sea. Finally, the River Dodder, over the ridge of a sloping bank, becomes the setting for the boys’ encounter with the josser. The liquidity that was so controlled and safely distant at the beginning of the story is now more unsuppressed and threatening. The Wharf Road, with its childish games and sturdy stone, even its harmless reprimands from adults, would seem a far safer and more secure location than the unfettered sloping bank of the Dodder with its strange inhabitants.
As soon as the narrator of “Araby” finally gets some money from his late-arriving uncle, he takes off down Buckingham Street on his way to the bazaar: “I held a florin tightly in my hand as I strode down Buckingham Street towards the station” (34). Buckingham Street is situated just southwest of the narrator’s residence. From his house in North Richmond Street, he must first go southwest into North Circular Road, travel southeast briefly to Summerhill, turn right, and then turn left into Buckingham Street. Once there, he must travel a quarter mile (.4 km) down the entire street until he reaches Amiens Street where the train station is located.
Section of Letts, Son & Co. 1883 Plan of the city of Dublin map showing the entire length of Buckingham Street and the Railway Terminus. Made available at the David Rumsey Map Collection online.
Buckingham Street, Dr. Ruth McManus and Ms. Sinead O’Shea suggest, “represents a microcosm of the city’s development from its initial layout by speculative landowners in the late 18th century ‘golden age’, through its largely middle-class residential status in the 19th century, its demotion to tenement use, then attempted rehabilitation in the late 20th century.” The narrator would have been traveling down this residential street a little after 9pm, and if his uncle is correct, the residents of the houses would have been “in bed and after their first sleep” already (34).
Things might have become a bit more lively as he approached the intersection of Buckingham, Amiens, and Montgomery Streets, though. Montgomery Street was part of “Monto,” the city’s red-light district. Though the boy would not have been in its midst, he would be right on the edge, an appropriate position as he teeters on adolescence. His entire trip, in fact, parallels the movement from childhood to maturity through its increasingly public and complex locations and it evolving modes of transportation (e.g. walking to train riding). Buckingham Street, with its transition from sleeping residents to soliciting women, becomes, to use McManus and O’Shea’s language, a “microcosm” of the revelations the boy experiences in his final epiphany.
South Great George’s Street Market. Photograph ca. 1865-1914 by Robert French, made available through the National Library of Ireland’s digitized Lawrence Photograph Collection
Not to be confused with The Stores on the same street, the City Markets were a collection of businesses housed inside a large building in South Great George’s Street. Essentially a shopping mall now named George’s Street Arcade, the City Markets were completed and opened in 1881. The project was commissioned in 1876 and was, according to Christine Casey’s Dublin: The City Within the Grand and Royal Canals and the Circular Road, an “ambitious covered market” to be designed by architects Lockwood and Mawson of England. When it first opened, none of the Dublin public were invited to the private ceremony, causing quite a controversy.
The spot figures only briefly in “Two Gallants” as a point of reference in Lenehan’s walk through Dublin while he awaits his friend Corley: “He left his friends at a quarter to ten and went up George’s Street. He turned to the left at the City Markets and walked on into Grafton Street” (58).
The lines forming the route of Corley and Lenehan, then Lenehan alone, in “Two Gallants.”
At this point in his route, Lenehan is about to complete the closing line of a gnomon-shaped path that he had begun when he first left Stephen’s Green on his solitary stroll. During his walk, he contemplates all the things that are missing from his life, and it’s only when he again reaches Stephen’s Green that he leaves off contemplating the emptiness and refocuses on the moment near at hand when he will reunite with Corley and learn whether his friend has been successful on his mission. The emotional gnomon is visually reflected in his path, and it’s on this last line of the gnomon when he begins moving more quickly, anxious to meet his friend and shut out the solitude. Is there a reason he moves so quickly here? Is there something other than the possibility of being late pushing him forward at this moment?
The City Markets as a landmark along the route offer complex interpretive possibilities. Naturally, the commercial nature of the place parallels the theme of materialism in the story as a whole. But approaching the reference historically begins to reveal other implications. Earlier in the story, Corley reveals that in an attempt to prove his unmarriagability to his lady friend, he offers to her the excuse that “[he] was out of a job…[because he] was in Pim’s” (51). As discussed in The Stores (aka Pim’s) post, Corley may be confusing Pim’s with the City Markets, which burned down in 1892 and weren’t restored until 1894. If Corley’s fabricated place of employment had burned, his unemployed state would make sense. However, it was not actually Pim’s that burned but the City Markets. And if the story is indeed set during the period of these two years, then when Lenehan turns left at the City Markets, he would be no doubt be confronted with the burnt out or blocked off facade of the building. Even if the story is set after, Lenehan might be confronted with the reminder of the fire through the renovated structure. Is he aware in this moment of his friend’s mistake? Was he always aware? And whether he is or isn’t aware of the inaccuracy, what does he think of his friend’s attempt to not only get out of marriage but also disingenuously elicit sympathy from the girl by making her think he was out of work due to a devastating fire? The underhanded duplicity isn’t unexpected of Corley, but when Lenehan is faced with the ruins or the repairs of the real disaster, what does it suggest that he hurries past, arriving in Grafton Street in the span of a single sentence? Is his indifference yet another sign of his complicity with Corley’s schemes? Does his lack of acknowledgment of Corley’s lies and manipulations at this moment in the story constitute a reversal of his moments-earlier desire to turn his life around?
Mentioned in both “Eveline” and “Two Gallants,” the Stores was actually a department store in South Great George’s Street. Don Gifford refers to it as “a small wholesale-retail empire” run by Pim Brothers Limited. Pictured below, the Pim’s Department Store was “designed by Sandham Symes and built in several stages by the Pim family from the mid 1850s onwards,” according to Archiseek. And Shaw’s 1850 Dublin Directory shows “Pim Brothers and Co., [at] 75-82 South Great George’s St (wholesale and retail linen and woollen drapers, silk mercers, hosiers and haberdashers).” Incidentally, one member of the prominent Quaker Pim family was Elizabeth Eveleen Pim.
1856 – Pim’s Department Store, Sth Great George’s Street, Dublin. From Archiseek, http://archiseek.com/2011/1856-pims-department-store-sth-great-george/#.UvORzUJdUQ5
Eveline, the young woman in Joyce’s story, works in the Stores to bring in income for her family. The place holds connotations of responsibility for Eveline, and it appears in direct contrast to her whimsical fantasies of running off with her lover Frank:
“Of course she had to work hard both in the house and at business. What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had run away with a fellow?” (37)
The Stores appear again in quite another context, as “Pim’s,” in “Two Gallants.” Corley boasts to Lenehan about his “slavey,” admitting that he essentially lied to her, telling her that he had worked in Pim’s and was now out of a job:
“Maybe she thinks you’ll marry her,” said Lenehan.
“I told her I was out of a job,” said Corley. “I told her I was in Pim’s. She doesn’t know my name. I was too hairy to tell her that. But she thinks I’m a bit of class, you know.”
There is no explanation in the story of how or why Corley would no longer work in Pim’s. However, the Times, London’s Annual Summaries [1851-1892] reports “the co-operative stores in Dublin were burned out” in 1892 (201). Corley would certainly have been out of work at Pim’s if it had recently burned down. The reference is still somewhat murky, however, since other accounts don’t place the 1892 fire at Pim’s, but rather at another well-known Great George’s Street shopping area, the City Markets. The markets, also referenced in “Two Gallants” as Lenehan makes his back to meet Corley after wandering the city, are a block north of the department store on the east side of the street. (The Market would be to the right of the diagram below.) Now called the George’s Street Arcade, the Markets, according to their website’s history, were originally opened with a large private luncheon that featured “the Chairman of the market company Mr Joseph Tod Hunter Pim.” Eleven years later, in 1892, a fire devastated the markets, but they were repaired and rebuilt in 1894.
Diagram for businesses in South Great George’s Street, including Pim’s Department Store.
Is it possible that Corley had been referring to the City Markets when he said he worked in Pim’s? The Pims were certainly prominent merchants in Great George’s Street and may have operated a shop in the markets in addition to their department store down the street. Or is Corley conflating Pim’s Department Store and the City Markets, ignorant of his mistake? If so, is it possible that his lady friend probably sees through his lies? Or is his immediate shift from “I told her I was out of a job” to “I told her I was in Pim’s” simply a non-sequitur, having nothing to do with the fire that could have understandably put him out of work temporarily? Is Joyce himself conflating Pim’s and the Markets?
In any case, there’s room for more study here. Among one of the more compelling literary implications is the idea that Corley, already a manipulative cad, is made even lower by his intent to garner sympathy for his lack of a job due to a devastating fire.
Not to be confused with the modern-day Spring Garden Street just south of the Liffey and George’s Quay, Spring Gardens, as it is referenced in “The Boarding House,” was an area well north of the Liffey, between the royal Canal and the River Tolka. Today, as Spring Garden Lane, it appears in the satellite view on the map to be a narrow half-auto-repair, half-residential street. It intersects with North Strand Road and is situated very near the path walked by the boys of “An Encounter.” Spring Gardens, or “Spring Garden” (no s) on the 1883 Letts, Son & Co. map below, is given as the nearest point of reference for where Mrs. Mooney sets up her first business: “She had married her father’s foreman and opened a butcher’s shop near Spring Gardens” (61).
Screenshot of the section of the 1883 Letts, Son & Co. “Plan of the city of Dublin” map containing North Strand Road. The road is under the blue line that indicates a tram route. Spring Garden, barely legible, is the street above Bay View Avenue and below the Chemical Works, connecting North Strand Road and Ballybough Road under the yellow line. Map available online through the David Rumsey Map Collection.
According to John Wyse Jackson and Bernard McGinley’s annotations, “Joyce originally wrote ‘in Fairview'” (53) rather than “in Spring Gardens” which would have put the shop north of the River Tolka, in a suburban neighborhood that houses, among other things, the oldest Jewish cemetery in Dublin, built in 1718. The Jewish colony around Fairview had their synagogue, however, down in the city center, at Marlboro Green (below), just off of Marlborough Street, where Mrs. Mooney plans to attend short-twelve mass. The connection between Fairview and Marlborough Street as references, then, becomes quite suggestive. The deleted reference removes further religious connotations from the already present tension between the story’s bells of St. George’s, which is a Church of Ireland, and Mrs. Mooney’s plans for attending Catholic mass.
1836 map of Dublin, showing Marlboro Green just northwest of the Custom House and east of Marlborough Street. Map by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Great Britain), available at the online David Rumsey Map Collection.
Marlborough Street no longer contained a synagogue by Joyce’s time. It had been closed in 1790, due to, as noted by Katherine Butler in “Synagogues of Old Dublin,” “the Jewish community being almost completely dispersed. By 1805 there were only three Jewish families in Dublin and by 1818 there were only two, numbering nine souls in all” (123). This dispersion was partially due, Butler explains, to the same decrees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that prohibited Catholicism. Mrs. Mooney, a Catholic moving from Spring Garden to Hardwicke Street to Marlborough Street on her path toward her Catholic church, is a significantly more enfranchised echo of the Jewish woman moving from Joyce’s deleted Fairview to the closed and converted synagogue.
As it is, Spring Gardens is a fairly innocuous reference. The shop had been near there, not exactly there. Yet the revision of the reference injects intriguing and suggestive currents underneath a story already rich in religious sub-text, subliminal as it may be.
Grafton Street in Dublin today is a chic, bustling shopping lane. In the time of James Joyce, it was, as Don Gifford describes, “a street of…fashionable shops” (54). Apparently, it has sustained its air of lively, happening nowness over the century and continues to be an energetic place to stroll. And stroll do the many characters in Dubliners. Grafton Street pops up five times in the book: twice each in “After the Race” and “Two Gallants,” and once in “Grace.”
Woman walking with dog on leash past Sibley & Co., stationers, Grafton Street. Photograph from the digitized Clarke Photographic Collection at National Library Ireland. Photo created 1897-1904? http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000168687
In “After the Race,” Grafton Street is the setting of much energy and society. The references to the street work to reify the “rapid motion through space” (44) that characterizes the story’s mood. First, it’s mentioned as a place in the distance, an exit direction for the car after Jimmy and Villona disembark and begin walking towards Jimmy’s father’s house:
“The car steered out slowly for Grafton Street while the two young men pushed their way through the knot of gazers” (45).
After the young men change clothes, they go back out into the busy Dublin evening and eventually meet their friends Segouin and Riviere, from the car, and run into Riviere’s friend Farley, a portly American:
“At the corner of Grafton Street a short fat man was putting two handsome ladies on a car in charge of another fat man. The car drove off and the short fat man caught sight of the party” (47).
Now a party of five, the young men eventually leave the bustle of the city center and head out to make their own bustle in private on Farley’s yacht, which is waiting in Kingstown Harbour.
Grafton Street has a completely different feel to it in “Two Gallants.” While still a crowded and vibrant locale, it’s in strong opposition to what Lenehan feels as he traverses its length from Stephen’s Green to College Green after which he continues north all the way to Rutland Square:
“He walked listlessly round Stephen’s Green and then down Grafton Street. Though his eyes took note of many elements of the crowd through which he passed they did so morosely. He found trivial all that was meant to charm him and did not answer the glances which invited him to be bold. He knew that he would have to speak a great deal, to invent and to amuse, and his brain and throat were too dry for such a task” (56).
After wandering, eating peas, and stopping to talk to some friends he has encountered, he finds Grafton Street again:
“He left his friends at a quarter to ten and went up George’s Street. He turned to the left at the City Markets and walked on into Grafton Street. The crowd of girls and young men had thinned and on his way up the street he heard many groups and couples bidding one another good-night” (58).
It is once the action around him begins to die down that Lenehan begins to perk up, going so far as to “set off briskly,…hurrying for fear Corley should return too soon” (59). Once he arrives at the meeting spot, “[h]is mind became active again.”
Man and woman standing outside Sibley’s Stationery Shop, Grafton Street. Photograph from digitized Clarke Photographic Collection at National Library Ireland. Photo created 1897-1904? http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000168914
If the reference to Grafton Street parallels the mood of “After the Race” and juxtaposes that of “Two Gallants,” it does something much more complex in “Grace.” In this story, Grafton Street is the location of the bar in which Mr. Kernan has his accident. It is this accident that sets in motion the events of the story. Once he is found, blood tricking from his mouth, at the foot of the stairs to the bar’s lavatory, he is carried up and laid on the floor of the bar. His friend Mr. Power comes to his aide and takes him outside:
“When they came out into Grafton Street, Mr. Power whistled for an outsider” (153).
The horse-drawn outsider finally delivers the two men to Mr. Kernan’s home in the Glasnevin Road, which isn’t exactly one road but a path by which one would get to the northwestern suburb. Mr. Kernan apparently lives somewhere along this path. The two locations are quite different of course. One is a central artery of the city, bursting with youth, money, and vitality; the other is a peripheral vein, quietly pulsing with family, beef-tea, and familiar “personal odour” (156). For Mr. Kernan, one is a dangerous place to be and the other a safe and nurturing place to be. Ironically, the public life story uses one of the most populous places in Dublin as a space that its main character cannot safely or successfully occupy.
![[The Dodder River, Dublin], photographed by Robert French between 1880 and 1900, made available by the National Library of Ireland as part of the Lawrence Photograph Collection.](http://mappingdubliners.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/L_ROY_04716.jpg)
![This photograph, from the Griffith College website, shows a "[v]iew of bomb damage on the South Circular Road, January 1941, taken from behind the Griffith Barracks' railings. (Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)."](http://mappingdubliners.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ResizedImage600287-1823-1991.png)
