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.
Once Mahony finally arrives (and Joe Dillon doesn’t) at their meeting place, he and the narrator of “An Encounter” embark on their day’s journey. The two boys set off from the Canal Bridge and head northeast:
“We walked along the North Strand Road till we came to the Vitriol Works and then turned to the right along the Wharf Road” (22).
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.
The North Strand Road runs northeast from the Newcomen (Canal) Bridge to the East Wall (Wharf) Road on the south bank of the Tolka River. (It’s where the blue tram line appears on the map section above.) Charles Haliday’s The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin describes the area of the North Strand as it was depicted in a 1673 map by Sir Bernard de Gomme. According to the map, much of the east side of Dublin was under water after a major storm hit the city. Even when it wasn’t underwater, it was subject to flooding and only traversable by foot at low tide, according to Haliday’s fascinating accounts.
In Dubliners, North Strand Road marks the northeast boundary of the childhood stories. From the bridge to the Wharf Road, the boys walk 550 meters along North Strand, which would take approximately 7 minutes. The road is referenced only in “An Encounter,” a story that mentions several bodies of water. The boys begin at a bridge over the Royal Canal, walk along the Tolka, cross the Liffey, and end up on the bank of the Dodder. They also gaze out at the bay toward the Irish Sea.
St. George’s Church appears in “The Boarding House” through the sound of its bells pealing. The sound marks the time (just after 11 on a Sunday morning) as well as the location of the boarding house where Mrs. Mooney sits conspiring to collect her “reparations” from Bob Doran who has been carrying on an affair with her daughter Polly:
“The belfry of George’s Church sent out constant peals and worshippers, singly or in groups, traversed the little circus before the church, revealing their purpose by their self-contained demeanour no less than by the little volumes in their gloved hands” (63).
As the bells ring, Mrs. Mooney watches the maid clean up the remains of breakfast and thinks about the conversation she had had the night before with her daughter concerning the affair. Several minutes pass until:
“Mrs. Mooney glanced instinctively at the little gilt clock on the mantelpiece as soon as she had become aware through her revery that the bells of George’s Church had stopped ringing. It was seventeen minutes past eleven: she would have lots of time to have the matter out with Mr. Doran and then catch short twelve at Marlborough Street.” (64).
St. George’s Church, Dublin. Photograph by Robert French, published between 1880 and 1900, is part of the Lawrence Photograph Collection, available online through the National Library of Ireland.
Even though St. George’s is just steps away from the boarding house in Hardwicke Street, because she is Catholic, Mrs. Mooney intends to walk south and east 11 minutes to St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Marlborough Street for the shortest mass of the day. St. George’s, located at the top of Hardwicke Street, belonged to the Church of Ireland. The juxtaposition of these two denominations in such short textual proximity creates, on one hand, a kind tension between the religious values and doctrines of each church. For instance, divorce is forbidden by the Catholic church, but Mrs. Mooney, a Catholic, has already herself “gone to the priest and got a separation from [her husband] with care of the children” (61). Bob Doran, too, is confined by his association with the Catholic Church in that his confession to the priest the night before had put him in a state of acceptance for the imminent reparations he must make by marrying Polly. Additionally, his job in a Catholic wine merchant’s office is jeopardized by his sinful state, creating even more pressure for him to atone for his sins by getting married. If either of these characters were Protestant, not only could they more conveniently gain or retain their independence, they wold have a shorter walk to church on Sunday. The bells pealing behind Mrs. Mooney’s anxious plotting and Bob Doran’s regrets and self-doubt seem almost like a loud and clear, yet ultimately ignored, wake-up call.
On the other hand, the Church of Ireland and the Catholic Church are both set up against the notion of secularism and even atheism. Before facing Mrs. Mooney, Bob Doran recalls his youthful days when he “boasted of his free-thinking and denied the existence of God to his companions in public- houses” (66). Meanwhile, Mrs. Mooney is called a “Madam” and encourages, by omission of discouragement, her daughter to have “the run of the young men” (63) at the boarding house, which “was beginning to get a certain fame” (66).
As a structure and a dwelling, St. George’s has historically been perhaps as shaky as any religious doctrine the characters of “The Boarding House” might espouse. According to a 2009 Irish Times article, “[e]ven while St George’s was a church, the building was put to other uses and once had a bonded warehouse in the vaults in the cellar, which the congregation found somewhat hard to stomach.” The church was built between 1802 and 1814, and since then has undergone many changes. According to the same article, “the church became well known for an addition 22 years after it was built when that wide roof began to splay further than it should, due to the strain of the wide-span timber trusses. Civil engineer Robert Mallet, whose father ran an iron foundry, created cast-iron trusses to haul the church back into shape. Mallet knew about rocky foundations, being also an expert on earthquakes: he is credited with creating the word ‘seismology.'” Since Joyce’s day, the church has been a night club, a theatre, and an office building.
It’s also worth noting that the bells of St. George’s, as well as its steeple, also appear in Ulysses. Reciprocally, Bantam of Lyons of Ulysses makes a cameo in “The Boarding House” as another potential, though more difficult to acquire, suitor for Polly.
Near the end of “The Sisters,” we learn from Eliza that she, her brother Father James Flynn, and their other sister Nannie are all originally from Irishtown:
“But still and all he kept on saying that before the summer was over he’d go out for a drive one fine day just to see the old house again where we were all born down in Irishtown and take me and Nannie with him. If we could only get one of them new-fangled carriages that makes no noise that Father O’Rourke told him about, them with the rheumatic wheels, for the day cheap — he said, at Johnny Rush’s over the way there and drive out the three of us together of a Sunday evening. He had his mind set on that…. Poor James!” (16)
“Irishtown Road.” Irishtown, Dublin, Ireland. The photograph was published between 1890 and 1910 and is part of the Lawrence Photograph Collection available online at the National Library of Ireland.
There are several places in Ireland that carry the name “Irishtown,” and most likely, because of its proximity to the priest and his sisters’ home in Great Britain Street, Don Gifford identifies the reference as the Irishtown that is the “poor, working-class slum just south of the mouth of the Liffey and therefore east and south of Great Britain Street” (Gifford 34).
The location, however, could be more ambiguous than this obvious assumption. At the very least the reference holds ambiguous connotations. First, the general nature of the name parallels the general political implications of the earlier reference to Great Britain Street. That the priest was born in a house in Irishtown and died in an apartment above a Great Britain Street drapery shop brings up the ever-present theme of Ireland versus Britain in Dubliners as a whole.
Additionally, we might explore the alternative locations implied by the name Irishtown. At least two other Irishtowns existed as medieval periphery villages or sections of larger cities. These villages were home to people who identified as pre-Anglian Irish. One of these areas (pictured below) is what one history identifies as “probably the original town of Kilkenny,” in the shadow of St. Canice’s Cathedral (Murtagh and Patterson 5). A transcript of the Corporation Book of the Irishtown of Kilkenny, 1537-1628 provides a fascinating log of the rules for pricing materials as well as names of town officials, including the watchmen of the three city gates. According to the introduction, “The Corporation Book of the Irishtown, Kilkenny, has been known to historians at least since the time of Graves and Prim, who quote from it more than once in their History of St. Canice’s Cathedral (1857); in 1874 Sir John Gilbert, presumably with publication in view, had the greater part of it transcribed” (Ainsworth 3).
“Panorama as seen from St. Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny City, Co. Kilkenny.” Photograph was published between 1860 and 1883 and is part of the Stereo Pairs Collection online at the National Library of Ireland.
Another Irishtown, in Limerick, is part of the locale for the legend of the Brazen Head. According to legend as published in The Old Limerick Journal, “the women from the Abbey and the lrishtown were joining with the hard pressed garrison in repelling the Williamites” who were all defeated when, under the command of William of Orange (a figure also referenced in “the Dead”), they assaulted the Black Battery (Gleeson ?8).
While neither of these places, nor two others listed in Counties Antrim and Mayo, would have been comfortably accessible for a Sunday evening drive in a “new-fangled carriage…with rheumatic wheels” (such a carriage would have been a horse-drawn cart, making the journey between 7 hours [by bicycle] and 23 hours [by foot], according to the map), it is nonetheless characteristic of Joyce to inject layers of implication into such a seemingly simple geographical reference. It’s worth noting that another priest in Dubliners is connected with an ambiguous location as well. In “Eveline,” the unnamed priest in the photograph is said to have moved to Melbourne. It’s all Eveline’s father will say of him, and the vagueness of her father’s explanation (“[w]henever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word”) is enough of an intrigue to warrant her focus on the matter as something worth noting (37). “Melbourne” would most likely refer to Melbourne, Australia, but Melbournes also exist in England as well as Canada, a place Frank has been known to travel.
Basically, the reference to Irishtown in “The Sisters” is anything but a simple Sunday destination. It swells with political and historical implication and generates avenues of exploration among many other works by Joyce.
Long shot Wellington Memorial, Phoenix Park, Dublin City, Co. Dublin. From the National Library of Ireland’s The Stereo Pairs Collection, featuring the work of photographers James Simonton and Frederick Holland Mares. http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000564051
A figure of the tension between English and Irish, the Wellington monument stands, for Gabriel in “The Dead,” as a longed-for alternative to the cramped and perceptibly judgmental space of the Morkans’ party just after Molly Ivors declares him a West Briton. As he shifts his attention to the impending speech, Gabriel longs to be outside in the cold open air:
“How cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument. How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper-table!” (192)
Geographically, the monument resides in Phoenix Park, a locale often referenced in “A Painful Case.” It’s about 1.5 kilometers walking distance from Usher’s Island, where the party is. To Gabriel at this moment, the site represents an escape from his own responsibility to his hosts and fellow guests, a retreat to solitude and exteriority. Politically, though, the place marker signifies a part of Gabriel that perhaps longs to be free of Irish responsibility.
The Wellingotn Monument is an obelisk commemorating the military accomplishments of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. He was an Irish born British statesman and highly esteemed and decorated military leader who eventually served as Prime Minister. Thus, in many ways, the Duke of Wellington embodies Gabriel’s position as Irish and British, and his desire to retreat to the monument expresses his desire to overpower the polemics of the recent argument with Molly Ivors, though in perhaps a militaristic and even phallic way.
The monument is mentioned again, but before it is, we get a detailed and rather militaristic description of the food and wine arranged in the dining room. Bottles of stout are “squads” in uniform, and “[i]n the centre of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one containing port and the other dark sherry.” The pyramid might be compared to the obelisk as the interior monument to public life.
Gabriel envisions the monument again just before he begins his speech:
“In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres.
He began:
–Ladies and Gentlemen,” (202)
The reference here recalls the image that he initially uses to consciously shift his thoughts away from the argument with Miss Ivors and on to his approaching speech. Its placement here is partially a reminder of that shift and perhaps also a kind of invoking of the muse of the duke who, as Commander in Chief of the British Army, would certainly possess skill in public speaking. Some of these speeches, in fact, were collected by George Henry Francis in Maxims and Opinions of Field-Marshal His Grace the Duke of Wellington, Selected From His Writings and Speeches During a Public Life of More Than Half a Century. The public life, the life of speech-making and strategizing, towers like an obelisk for Gabriel. It looms as much in the crowded warmth of Usher’s Island as it does in the cold snowy night.
Close-Up of Ringsend on an 1883 Letts, Son & Co. Map of Dublin. Available at David Rumsey Collection Online.
Ringsend is a small suburb of Dublin located on the south shore and east end of the Liffey. It’s where the narrator and Mahony spend the final stage of their school-skipping journey and where they meet the josser. At first, the two only see the area from a distance, from north of the river, which could be interpreted as a safe position compared to the yet unknown dangers that lurk on the other side:
“We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce — the barges signalled from far away by their curls of woolly smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay” (23).
At this moment Mahony, anticipating “Eveline’s” Frank, gets the idea to “run away to sea on one of those big ships.” And anticipating the effects of the largeness of the world on Eveline, the narrator “[sees], or imagine[s], the geography which had been scantily dosed to [him] at school gradually taking substance under [his] eyes.” Though this sentiment isn’t expressed directly in “Eveline,” her paralysis on the North Wall is certainly due to the substantial geography swirling in her mind when her imagined travels present themselves as impending reality.
In “An Encounter,” the boys do board a boat, albeit a simple ferry to the other side of the river. Once there, they watch the sailors for a while before continuing their travels:
“When we were tired of this sight we wandered slowly into Ringsend” (23).
The original plan had been to take the South Wall all the way out to the Pigeon House, but by the time they spend their money in Ringsend on biscuits, chocolate, and raspberry lemonade and chase a cat through a lane and into a field, they decide to just plop down on a sloping bank and watch the Dodder flow by. This is where they encounter the strange man who casts an unexpected shadow over their adventures.
While Ringsend itself is nonthreatening and rather mundane, because of its position across the river, it represents an unfamiliar and rather adult world. As with “Araby,” which also ends on the south side of the Liffey, the ending of “An Encounter” suggests a foray into adolescence, one that is not followed by an actual return home (though one is suggested) to the safer north bank. Incidentally, Araby would have been only slightly south of the boys’ position at the end of “An Encounter,” and the train they would be taking home would be the same one the narrator of “Araby” would take to get home from the bazaar.
A harbour at Montreal in1874 from the Customs House. Alexander Henderson / Library and Archives Canada / PA-149728. From http://www.theshipslist.com/pictures/montreal1874.shtml
While many of Joyce’s references are unquestionably exact, even down to the address or the name of the establishment, others are dauntingly vague. For example, the reference to Canada in “Eveline,” at first glance seems expansive, especially as it refers to Frank’s adventures in Eveline’s limited perspective:
He had tales of distant countries. He had started as a deck boy at a pound a month on a ship of the Allan Line going out to Canada” (39).
Canada also serves as the birthplace of Andre Riviere in “After the Race:”
“They were Charles Segouin, the owner of the car; Andre Riviere, a young electrician of Canadian birth; a huge Hungarian named Villona and a neatly groomed young man named Doyle” (42-43).
In “After the Race,” the reference serves partly as an emphasis on the international overtones of the story. The young men in the story come from all over the Western hemisphere and converge in Dublin in celebration of youth, energy, and speed.
A country spanning 9.98 million square kilometers is, as a geographic reference, quite a deviation in scale from, say, Mulligan’s pub in Poolbeg Street. Its magnitude is consistent with the general internationalism of “After the Race” as well as Eveline’s perception of all the far-away worlds Frank inhabits. In Eveline’s case, it would make sense that, to her, Canada is just Canada, a vast world contained within a single word. However, Frank is probably only familiar with a small part of the country, and it’s one of four major cities that serve as the ports for the Allan Line.
The Allan Line was a shipping company in service from 1854 to 1911. (After 1911, it merged with another company.) It sailed between North America, Europe, and South America (including “Buenos Ayres”) and was operated by a Canadian shipping family based in Quebec. Of its several steam ship routes between 1854 and 1917 (when its merger with Canadian Pacific Line was made official), five served ports in Canada:
1854 – 1917 Liverpool – (Moville) – Quebec – Montreal (summer)
1854 – 1903 Liverpool – (Halifax) – Portland (winter)
The Ships List website lists all of the Allan Line ships that would have sailed those routes and features several photographs of the ships as well as the ports. “[Frank] told [Eveline] the names of the ships he had been on,” but the names aren’t mentioned in the story. Incidentally, though, one of the ships was the Bohemian, a name correlating with The Bohemian Girl opera referenced only a few sentences before the Allan Line reference in the story. The ship, however, was only in operation for five years before it sank off the coast of Maine in February of 1864, killing 20 people. The ship’s life would most likely predate Frank’s time as a deck boy. Other ships included the Brazilian, Parisian, Prussian, and St. Andrew, to name just a few.
While in the case of “Eveline,” the reference to Canada may seem at first vague and even intimidating, it is actually no more vague than the references in the same story to place like Buenos Ayres, Melbourne, Belfast, or the Straits of Magellan. What seems to be a reference to an entire country is really a reference to only a few possible port cities off of the Atlantic Ocean. To Eveline, though, it’s a world away from the world that holds her tightly in its grip.
Royal Avenue, Balfast, Antrim. Photograph from the National Library of Ireland’s Eason Photographic Collection. Dated 1900-1940.
Belfast, now the capital of Northern Ireland, was in Joyce’s day an industrial center that generally, partly because its population depended on its industry, opposed Home Rule. In Dubliners, the city appears in three stories: “Eveline,” “Clay,” and “Grace.” That the adolescence, maturity, and public life sections all reference Belfast, while the childhood section omits it, may be of some interest in terms of the political implications of the place as they would manifest in the psychology of the stories’ inhabitants. In other words, a young child would be most likely uninterested in, if not unaware of, the simmering anxieties associated with Belfast. But perhaps more importantly, with the exception of “The Sisters,” none of the childhood stories reference places outside of Dublin at all, and in “The Sisters,” the outside references pertain to the priest. The first-person child-as-narrator in the other two stories has very little concern for anyone or anywhere outside his own orbit.
In “Eveline,” Belfast is the home of the man who had built the new houses on Eveline’s street: “One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children. Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it — not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs” (36). The slick new houses built by the man from Belfast serve as a source of disrupted memory for Eveline, whose adolescence and approaching adulthood are already being colored by materialism fast overtaking the simple pleasures of playing in a field.
In “Clay,” Belfast is where Maria’s purse was purchased: “She took out her purse with the silver clasps and read again the words A Present from Belfast. She was very fond of that purse because Joe had brought it to her five years before when he and Alphy had gone to Belfast on a Whit-Monday trip” (100). Moving beyond Eveline’s vague association, Maria’s awareness of Belfast is as a commercial center and a place where one would go on Whit-Monday (the day after Pentecost, usually in May or June, observed as a public holiday in Ireland until 1973). For her, Balfast is thus a sentimental association with Joe, albeit one that sustains the materialism of Eveline’s association since it is both a money holder and a purchased gift.
“Grace” employs Belfast in connection to the Kernans’ success as parents: “Her two eldest sons were launched. One was in a draper’s shop in Glasgow and the other was clerk to a tea-merchant in Belfast” (156). Glasgow, known in the Victorian period as the “Second City of the British Empire,” not only rivaled Belfast in terms of industry and commerce but also carries political implications. If in the previous two stories Belfast only conveyed commercial connotations, here, set alongside Glasgow, the “Second City of the British Empire,” Belfast becomes a politically charged reference, controversial, perhaps, in Joyce’s use of it as a destination for successfully raised children.
Even though none of the stories attach Belfast explicitly to the political tensions of Ireland and the British Empire, the implications resonate–first at the level of rumor, then sentimental materialism, and finally commercial, vocational, and parental accomplishment.
One of the longest and most intricate routes in Dubliners is contained in “Two Gallants.” Though the “After the Race” route spans roughly 17 kilometers (10.6 miles), and “Two Gallants” only about 8.4 km (5.25 mi.), the former is traveled via various methods of transportation while the latter is traversed entirely on foot. Unlike “After the Race,” which features a comparatively straight line from west to east, “Two Gallants” is full of winding, doubling-back, circling, and zig-zagging. Fading the map slightly, the route looks like this:
The lines forming the route of Corley and Lenehan, then Lenehan alone, in “Two Gallants.”
One striking feature of the geometrical funhouse that it is this route is the pseudo-gnomon in the vicinity of Great George’s Street. “Gnomon,” of course, is one of three words (along with “simony” and “paralysis”) that the narrator of “The Sisters” finds fascinating. It can be defined, in the Euclidean sense, as a parallelogram missing a smaller parallelogram from one of its corners. Here is a diagram and deeper explanation of gnomon. The gnomon reference in”Two Gallants” is quite invisible in a strictly textual reading, but surfaces beautifully with the aid of a map, a seemingly natural supplement to a story with so many geographic references and whose action is heavily informed by the location of the character(s) at any given moment. If the visual cue on its own isn’t entirely convincing, we might consider Lenehan’s thoughts just before he walks the gnomonic lines of his route. In a shop, eating his peas, he considers all the missing pieces of his life: a job, a home, a warm fire, a good dinner, “some good simple-minded girl with a little of the ready” (58). The empty space in his gnomonic route comes only a few minutes after he’s recognized the empty space in his life, a sort of perambulatory confirmation of his preceding thoughts.
The story’s interpretations are also enhanced by the element of time. Twilight is approaching, the street lamps are shining, and the moon and its double halo are already visible when the story opens. The sun sets in Dublin in August around 8:15 at the beginning of the month and about 9:20 at the end. At one point when Lenehan and Corley are still together, toward the beginning of the story, Lenehan notes it’s “[t]wenty after” (53) and later, after they separate he wonders “how he could pass the hours till he met Corley again” at “[h]alf ten.” Thus it’s probably just after 7 or (more likely) 8 at the beginning of the story. Corley and Lenehan walk together, joking and bantering, from Rutland Square to the east side of Stephen’s Green, a distance of about 2 kilometers. According to the map, walking from Rutland Square to Stephen’s Green would take 28 minutes. During their walk together, Lenehan listens to a long narrative of Corley’s and “laugh[s] noiselessly for fully half a minute” (50); they discuss Corley’s girl; they smoke a cigarette, discuss the evening’s plan, talk more about Corley’s girl, hear a harp play as they walk, spy on the girl, and then separate. All of this happens with seeming fluidity, and the men seem comfortable enough in each other’s presence. However, the conversation becomes more stilted, more strained, when we realize that it has taken place over nearly half an hour. Taking the time into consideration, the conversation shows signs of strain: a lughing reaction must take a full half a minute; a conversation topic dies and must be reignited several minutes later; the offer of a cigarette acts almost as a filler for the perhaps awkward silence. Once Corley breaks away from his companion to converse with his “slavey,” Lenehan wanders the city, covering nearly another six kilometers over the course of two to three more hours. Lenehan reunites with his friend after 10:30, maybe even 11.
Close-up of Letts, Son & Co. London 1883 Map of Dublin showing “Road from Naas” along the blue tram route line. Map available online at http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/js95yj
The Naas Road, what is referred to on at least two nineteenth-century maps of Dublin as the “Road from Naas,” is the route by which the race cars of “After the Race” enter the city: “The cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road” (42).
Running diagonally from southwest to northeast, the Naas Road is now just one section of the major N7 highway connecting Limerick and Dublin. Parts of the original road’s route, including the section the cars traveled along Inchicore Square, are no longer part of Naas Road proper but have been reassigned the R110 Road. The 1903 Gordon Bennet cup race, which the cars would have just competed in, was held in County Kildare, southwest of both Dublin and Naas.
Donnybrook, or Domhnach Broc, is a district in the south part of Dublin neighboring Ballsbridge, Sandymount, and Merrion. It’s where Corley of “Two Gallants” claims to have taken his “slavey” one day:
“I put my arm round her and squeezed her a bit that night. Then next Sunday, man, I met her by appointment. We went out to Donnybrook and I brought her into a field there” (50-51).
It’s soon revealed that Corley intends to meet this girl again that evening. Once Corley parts with Lenehan, Lenehan follows his friend at a distance to get a look at her. He finally observes the two “climbing the stairs of the Donnybrook tram” (56). Apparently the field was a hit, and the pair are off to visit it again.
The hardly romantic “field” Corley takes the girl to is on par with the probable connotation of the district itself. The site of the historic Donnybrook Fair, established in 1205 and ended in 1855 due to its “irksome” tendency to turn its visitors into “intoxicated savages,” Donnybrook is also a slang term for “[a] scene of uproar and disorder; a riotous or uproarious meeting; a heated argument,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. That such a place is the rendezvous spot for Corley and his girl amplifies the already crude or indelicate nature of their relationship.
Additionally, and not surprisingly, the reference holds connotations to a song, “Humours of Donnybrook,” which Joyce could have found in the 1849 Croker-PopularSongs. Here are the lyrics:
To Donnybrook steer all you sons of Parnassus Poor painters, poor poets, poor newsmen and knaves To see what the fun is that all fun surpasses The sorrows and sadness of green Erin's slaves Oh Donnybrook Jewel! Full of mirth is your quiver Where all flock from Dublin to gape and to stare At two elegant bridges without e'er a river So success to the humours of Donnybrook Fair
Oh you lads that are witty, from famed Dublin city And you that in pastime take any delight To Donnybrook fly, for the time's drawing nigh When fat pigs are hunted and lean cobblers fight When maidens so swift run for a new shift Men muffled in sacks, for a shirt they race there There jockeys well booted and horses sure-footed All keep up the humours of Donnybrook Fair
The mason does come with his line and his plumb The sawyer and carpenter, brothers in chips There are carvers and guilders and all sorts of builders With soldiers from barracks and sailors from ships There confectioners, cooks and the printers of books There stampers of linen and weavers repair There widows and maids and all sorts of trades Go join in the humours of Donnybrook Fair
There tinkers and nailers and beggars and tailors And singers of ballads and girls of the sieve With Barrack street rangers, the known ones and strangers And many that no one can tell how they live There horsemen and walkers and likewise fruit-hawkers And swindlers the devil himself that would dare With pipers and fiddlers and dandlers and diddlers All met in the humours of Donnybrook Fair
'Tis there are dogs dancing and wild beasts a-prancing With neat bits of painting, red, yellow and gold Toss players and scramblers and showmen and gamblers Pick-pockets in plenty, the young and the old There are brewers and bakers and jolly shoemakers With butchers and porters and men that cut hair There are montebanks grinning, while others are sinning To keep up the humours of Donnybrook Fair
Brisk lads and young lassies can fill up their glasses With whiskey and send a full bumper around Jig it off in a tent till their money's all spent And spin like a top till they rest on the ground Oh Donnybrook capers to sweet cat-gut scrapers They bother the vapours and drive away care And what is more glorious, there's naught more uproarious Hurrah for the humours of Donnybrook Fair
