Author: Jasmine Mulliken

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.

North Richmond Street

From the Google Earth version of the map, street view of North Richmond Street, facing the bind end.
From the Google Earth version of the map, street view of North Richmond Street, facing the bind end.

It might be one of the most recognizable first lines in English literature, and it happens to contain not just one but two specific geographical references to very real locations: “North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free” (29). The sentence is from “Araby,” certainly Joyce’s most anthologized story, and it is the setting for much of the story’s action. (The story’s title location is the locale for only the final few paragraphs.) The narrator’s home street is described as “blind” or having a dead end. At the blind end stands an empty house while “[t]he other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.” The almost haunting personification of the blind street and the gazing houses echoes the general hybridization of place and person that characterizes Dubliners and emphasizes the importance of place and geography in the collection as a whole.

Joyce himself lived at 17 North Richmond Street for a time when he was a child, and number 12 North Richmond Street is identified in Ulysses as a place where Stephen Dedalus’s mother had once kindled a fire for him (U 10.76). In “Araby,” it’s where the boy lives with his aunt and uncle, where he plays with his friends in the shadows, and where he falls in love with Mangan’s sister in the evening lamplight. The railings are mentioned several times and can be seen in the image above: “…I was alone at the railings. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing” (32). Later the boy recalls this image: “I may have stood there for an hour, seeing nothing but the brown-clad figure cast by my imagination, touched discreetly by the lamplight at the curved neck, at the hand upon the railings and at the border below the dress.” The description almost anticipates Gabriel’s image, a couple miles southwest at Usher’s Island, of his wife on the stairs listening to distant music.

Back Lane

Taylor's Hall, Back Lane, Dublin City, Co. Dublin. Published ca. 1865-1914. Photograph by Robert French from the National Library Ireland's Lawrence Photograph Collection.
Taylor’s Hall, Back Lane, Dublin City, Co. Dublin. Published ca. 1865-1914. Photograph by Robert French from the National Library Ireland’s Lawrence Photograph Collection.

Back Lane, where Gabriel Conroy teasingly situates his family’s ancestral mansion, is, despite its unassuming name, quite rich with history and allusion. Located just south of the Liffey, it’s a small, narrow lane, which according to the Database of Irish Excavation Reports, was “an important medieval street known as La Rochelle Street, presumably one of the premier residential streets of the city.” Parts of the medieval city wall still lie buried under the street’s structures, and the lane has seen several excavations in the past two decades. According to the report compiled from one of these excavations,

The site has the potential to contain some of the richest and best-preserved Viking and Anglo-Norman archaeological deposits within the medieval city on the basis of the survival of a Hiberno-Norse earthen bank which pre-dates the wall and the medieval deposits which present at a relatively high level on the Back Lane frontage. In addition the site also contains the remains of a 17th-century Jesuit chapel and novitiate.

Although Joyce was likely unaware of much of this recently uncovered history, he was certainly familiar with the Back Lane Parliament, a group meeting in December 1792 that drafted a petition to the king for relief from the harsh penal laws and restrictions on Catholics during the period. The meeting was called the Back Lane Parliament because they met at the Tailors’  Hall located in Back Lane. (For more on the fascinating history of the Tailors’ Guild and its Hall in Back Lane, see F.E. Dixon’s “The Dublin Tailors and Their Hall” in Dublin Historical Record , Vol. 22, No. 1 (Jan., 1968), pp. 147-159.)

In “The Dead,” Gabriel begins the story of Johnny, his grandfather’s horse, with a nod to Back Lane:

–So the old gentleman, as I said, harnessed Johnny and put on his very best tall hat and his very best stock collar and drove out in grand style from his ancestral mansion somewhere near Back Lane, I think.

Everyone laughed, even Mrs. Malins, at Gabriel’s manner and Aunt Kate said:

–O, now, Gabriel, he didn’t live in Back Lane, really. Only the mill was there” (207-08).

Gabriel continues his story, delighting his audience with the tale of Johnny, who “whether he fell in love with the horse King Billy sits on or whether he thought he was back again in the mill, anyhow…began to walk round the statue” (208). King Billy, of course, is known for ensuring the succession of Protestants to the British throne with his victory over James II during the Battle of the Boyne. The statue was erected in 1701 by Protestant Irish supporters of William III.

What may appear at first to be a simple geographic indicator is more likely Joyce establishing the political opposite of the King Billy symbol. The Back Lane and William of Orange references reintroduce the story’s continuing tensions between Catholic and Protestant, Irish and English.

Wicklow Street

Screenshot of Wicklow Street in the Google Maps version. Top is the street view and bottom is overhead view.
Screenshot of Wicklow Street in the Google Maps version. Top is the street view and bottom is overhead view.

In honor of Ivy Day (October 6), this week’s featured place is Wicklow Street, the setting of “Ivy Day in the Committee Room:”

“Mr. O’Connor had been engaged by Tierney’s agent to canvass one part of the ward but, as the weather was inclement and his boots let in the wet, he spent a great part of the day sitting by the fire in the Committee Room in Wicklow Street with Jack, the old caretaker” (119).

It’s where the canvassers gather to await their pay and where Hynes delivers his poetic tribute to Parnell.

“Ivy Day” is the only story to reference Wicklow Street, and in the story it is the most central location amid the other references. The location seems a logical centralizing place for a meeting room of canvassers who are spread out in Aungier and Dawson Streets. On a map, Aungier Street is southwest, or to the left of the committee room while Dawson Street is southeast, or to the right. The “left-leaning” O’Connor, appropriately, has been canvassing in Aungier Street,  and Henchy, who is “ambivalent center,” manages to sway Crofton the “conservative Orangeman on the far right” in Dawson Street (Gifford 88).

By the end of the story, all the characters seem to meet in the middle, around the fire in Wicklow Street, applauding in approval of Hynes’s tribute to Parnell. That the committee room is north of the canvassing areas, above those places on the map, adds an element of possibly ‘rising above’ the momentary political quibbles to reflect on a figure of historic political significance that has affected “The Irish heart where’er it be” (Joyce 134).

 

“After the Race” Route

Of all the stories in Dubliners, “After the Race” contains the longest route travelled by characters within a story. At approximately 17 kilometers (or about 10.5 miles), the route stretches from Naas Road, on the western outskirts of Dublin, all the way to the harbors in the sea at Kingstown. To cover such an expanse, the characters employ a variety of transportation methods, the most varied of all the stories in Dubliners.

Camille Jenatzy at the 1903 Gordon Bennett cup race in Ireland
Camille Jenatzy at the 1903 Gordon Bennett cup race in Ireland

The story begins as the cars, from what we can surmise was the 1903 Gordon Bennet cup race,  “c[o]me scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road” (42). The cars would have been, in that day, the newest, fastest, most advanced automobiles yet created. These machines “scudding” into the city set the fututristic tone of the story, whose descriptions, in many places, echo Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto.

Once the cars approach the bank, Jimmy Doyle and Villona, who have been perched on their French friend’s car, hop off and walk up to Jimmy’s house to change for dinner. The men meet up again and eat at the hotel in which Segouin and Riviere are staying. Afterwards, the four men and their English companion walk along Stephen’s Green, and, running into Farley, the American, they hop on another car and head for Westland Row station. They board a train, and, “in a few seconds, as it seemed to Jimmy, they were walking out of Kingstown Station…It was a serene summer night; the harbour lay like a darkened mirror at their feet…They got into a rowboat at the slip and made out for the American’s yacht” (47). By way of car, foot, car, train, rowboat, and yacht, these energetic youth cover a lot of Dublin ground. Unlike Gabriel and Gretta in “The Dead,” who, though they live only minutes away from Kingstown, take a cab to a hotel near their aunts’ house rather than make the long trek to Monkstown after the party, the young men of “After the Race,” with access to the newest and fastest modes of transportation, see nothing whatsoever daunting about a “few seconds” jaunt down to Kingstown for the sake of extending the party. Still, the vain and material isolation Jimmy Doyle feels at the end of the story is akin to that of the “Araby” narrator who also, with high hopes for the evening and the future, takes a train and is left, at the end of the story, far from home and wondering if it was all worth it.

Westland Row Station

Westland Row Station appears in two stories: “Araby” and “After the Race,” functioning as both a pass-through on and the beginning point for a train ride. In “Araby,” it’s referenced as a spot along the narrator’s route to the bazaar: “At Westland Row Station a crowd of people pressed to the carriage doors; but the porters moved them back, saying that it was a special train for the bazaar” (34). In “After the Race,” it’s where the young men board the train that will take them to Kingstown: “They took the train at Westland Row and in a few seconds, as it seemed to Jimmy, they were walking out of Kingstown Station” (47).

The Opening of the Dublin & Kingstown Railway at the Rere [sic] of Entrance Westland Row. Allen's, fl. 1820's-1830's lithographer., and J.D. artist Jones. The Opening of the Dublin & Kingstown Railway At the Rere [sic] of Entrance Westland Row: Shewing Cumberland St. & Arch, Part of All Hallows Chapel With Brunswick Street in the Distance. Dublin: [s.n.], 1834.
The Opening of the Dublin & Kingstown Railway at the Rere [sic] of Entrance Westland Row.
Allen’s, fl. 1820’s-1830’s lithographer., and J.D. artist Jones. The Opening of the Dublin & Kingstown Railway At the Rere [sic] of Entrance Westland Row: Shewing Cumberland St. & Arch, Part of All Hallows Chapel With Brunswick Street in the Distance. Dublin: [s.n.], 1834.

The station served as the terminus for the commuter line from Dublin to Kingstown and was built in 1834. The station is now called Pearse Station. The image to the right, from the National Library of Ireland, is a chromolithograph by J.D. Jones for Allan’s Publishing advertising the opening of the station. According to the “The History of the Dublin and Kingstown Railway,” the trains “were run on week days, every half hour, both ways from 9am until 5pm, while on Sundays trains ran every 20 minutes, with the exception of an interval from noon till 2pm. The single fare were 1s, 8d and 6d. for the three classes.”

Incidentally, two other stories include routes that would have been pretty nearly served by this rail line, but, perhaps due to the lack of stations adjacent to their destinations, the characters instead take trams. Maria in “Clay” takes a tram from Ballsbridge to Nelson’s Pillar and Farrington in “Counterparts” takes a tram from O’Connell Bridge to Shelbourne Road. The image below, a section of a Letts and Sons map from 1883, shows the rail line in red passing close to Shelbourne Road. A little further south we can see Ballsbridge. The blue line is the tram route, which obviously comes nearer to the precise locations Maria and Farrington need to access. It’s also worth noting that Gabriel and Gretta could have taken the train to Monkstown, but the trains would have long stopped running for the day by the time they left the Morkans’. Indeed, they don’t even arrive at the party until “long after 10 o’clock” (176). They most likely took a cab, and it would be an interesting investigation into modes of transportation of the day that would explore the reasons for all these characters’ choices of cab over tram or tram over train.

Plan of the city of Dublin. Letts's popular atlas. Letts, Son & Co. Limited, London. (1883) . From the David Rumsey Maps Collection online
Plan of the city of Dublin. Letts’s popular atlas. Letts, Son & Co. Limited, London. (1883) . From the David Rumsey Maps Collection online

Canal Bridge

Detail from the 1836 Map. See below for full interactive map. From the David Rumsey Map Collection Online.
Detail from the 1836 Map. See links (1836 and 1883) for full interactive maps. From the David Rumsey Map Collection Online.

The “Canal Bridge,” mentioned in “An Encounter,” is the rendezvous point for the narrator and his two friends on the morning of their excursion:

“We were to meet at ten in the morning on the Canal Bridge” (21).

Mahoney is the only friend to show up, and so the boys, giving up on Joe Dillon, walk northeast along the bridge into North Strand Road. Though in the story it’s only called the “Canal Bridge,” two maps from 1836 and 1883 (from the David Rumsey Collection) name this bridge that crosses the Royal Canal in northeast Dublin, Newcombe and Newcomen Bridge, respectively. Why the name was left out would be an interesting question to explore in more depth. However, it is safe to assume this is indeed the bridge in question as it feeds directly northeast into the first street the boys enter.

The canal is the first body of water the boys cross. They eventually ferry across the Liffey, and, depending on where the ferry lands on the south side of the Liffey, they may also cross the Dodder to get into Ringsend. In any case, they end up on a sloping bank of the Dodder where they meet the josser and then discuss the possibility of returning home by train. This mode of transportation would be quicker, and they could avoid the more liquidy parts of Dublin, which, by the end of the story, carry more salacious implications than the waterways of the city’s topography.

Marlborough Street

This week’s featured place is Marlborough Street, where Mrs. Mooney of “The Boarding House” plans to attend mass after her confrontation with Bob Doran: “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). “Short twelve” refers to noon mass, and even though the church is never directly named, Mrs. Mooney would have been attending Marlborough Street’s St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, officially the “first Catholic episcopal seat established anywhere in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland since the Protestant Reformation,” according to the detailed Wikipedia entry.

St. Mary's Pro-Cathedral at Marlborough and Cathedral Streets from the Google map version of the Mapping Dubliners Project. Also visible to the south is the marker for Earl Street.
St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral at Marlborough and Cathedral Streets from the Google map version of the Mapping Dubliners Project. Also visible to the south is the marker for Earl Street.

The cathedral’s official web site also provides a rich history of not only the cathedral itself but also of the turbulent political circumstances that led to its institution. The cathedral was finished in 1825 soon after the Penal Laws forbidding the building of Catholic churches dissipated. As Catholicism is closely tied to Irish Nationalism, the pro-cathedral carries connotations of open protest to the Churches of England and Ireland which were symbols of English rule. It’s fitting, then, that the pro-cathedral is also referenced in “A Mother,” in relation to the the Kearney family who are active in the Irish Revival: “On special Sundays, when Mr. Kearney went with his family to the pro-cathedral, a little crowd of people would assemble after mass at the corner of Cathedral Street” (137). St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral is indeed located at the corner of Marlborough and Cathedral Streets. Though Irish politics is an explicit theme in “A Mother,” it is perhaps less explicit in “The Boarding House,” making the somewhat hidden reference to the pro-cathedral in that story worthy of more study.

Incidentally, to add a musical element to this geographic reference, John McCormack, the oft-referenced tenor in Joyce’s works, was a member of the cathedral’s Palestrina Choir in 1904 and 1905. This connections provides perhaps a bit more fodder for those interested in the performative or musical elements of both these stories.

“Araby” Route

Once again, this week’s featured place is a route rather than one fixed location. The video below shows the path the narrator of “Araby” takes all alone one night in hopes of finding something special to buy for Mangan’s sister.

He starts in the street where he lives, North Richmond Street, walks down Buckingham Street, gets on a train which passes through Westland Row Station, and disembarks at the bazaar. The location of Araby, according to Don Gifford, is just across the River Dodder. As with the “An Encounter” route, the narrator does not return home but is left at the end of the story on the south side of the Liffey and east side of the Dodder. As all the childhood stories begin north of the Liffey, the crossing of it becomes almost a rite of passage, a journey into adulthood whether the move be temporary or permanent. The epiphany the narrator experiences at the end, coupled with the lack of a return home, emphasizes the permanence of the step toward maturity he has made even if we assume that he does return home after the end of the story.

To view the route on the map is to observe the visual cues of the journey. Though the trip is only represented in one paragraph in the text, it becomes quite a trek when seen played out on the screen and when considered as a solo night journey by a young boy. It begins with a walk along the streets before evolving into a more fast-paced train ride. The route as projected in Google Earth offers a modern-day view of the landscape, complete with tunnels and stadiums, but it also raises questions about that landscape as it would have appeared to a young boy in the 1890s. Was there indeed a tunnel on the path of the train? If so, what does the tunnel add symbolically to the narrator’s journey from home to Araby, from childhood to adolescence? What other elements of the landscape help contribute to the story’s themes?

Mulligan’s in Poolbeg Street

Screenshot of Google Earth street view of Mulligan's from the map. Copyright Google 2013.
Screenshot of Google Earth street view of Mulligan’s from the map. Copyright Google 2013.

This week’s featured place is Mulligan’s, a pub in Poolbeg Street that serves as the setting for Farrington’s arm wrestling match with Weathers in “Counterparts.”

It’s also where Farrington admires the lady from London, wishing that he hadn’t already spent all his money standing drinks for Weathers. It’s the final bar of the night, after Farrington and his varying crew have left Davy Byrne’s and the Scotch House:

“Weathers made them all have just one little tincture at his expense and promised to meet them later on at Mulligan’s in Poolbeg Street” (94).

“When the Scotch House closed they went round to Mulligan’s” (95).

According to the pub’s website, it was opened at its current location in 1854. Also according to the website, though they admit that the information is rather suspect, Joyce possibly “wrote at the counter of the premises while he sipped his guinness.” Regardless of whether or not that actually happened, Joyce certainly made a historic marker of the establishment by bringing his characters in for a few rounds on that February evening.

Storymap, “a web based multimedia project that revives Ireland’s age-old tradition of storytelling,” has filmed, on location, a re-enactment of the arm-wrestling scene in the story. The film is one of many that comprise this energetic interactive map of Dublin stories.

The Christian Brothers’ School

The place of the week, the Christian Brothers’ School, appears as a direct reference in “Araby” and “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” and indirectly in “An Encounter.” The school referenced in “Araby” is O’Connell School, which was established in 1829 in North Richmond Street. It is one of several Christian Brothers’ Schools established worldwide in the nineteenth century and the oldest in Dublin. But this school’s location is expressly noted in the opening sentence of the story:

“NORTH RICHMOND STREET being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free” (29);

The reference to the Christian Brothers’ School in “Ivy Day” is a bit more vague:

“–Ah, yes, he said, continuing, it’s hard to know what way to bring up children. Now who’d think he’d turn out like that! I sent him to
the Christian Brothers and I done what I could him, and there he goes boosing about. I tried to make him someway decent” (119) .

The location of the school is not specified; it could be any number of Christian Brothers’ Schools (CBSs) in Dublin at the time. In addition to the school in Richmond Street, CBSs were located in Synge Street and Westland Row. (These two in particular were popularized by Flann O’Brien’s satiric Bildungsroman A Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor.) The frame below shows a section of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction’s Annual General Report of the Department, Volume 7, Parts 1906-1907, which lists some of these schools as “not being national schools, in which instruction in drawing and manual work is recognised for grant by the department.”

The narrator of “An Encounter,” of course, is quick to point out that he and his companion are “not national schoolboys to be whipped,” (27) implying that they are, instead, students of a CBS, and most likely, based on other geographical references in the story, the one in North Richmond Street. Joyce and his brother Stanislaus even attended this particular school for a just a few months in 1893 before they were admitted to Belvedere for free by a sympathetic Father Conmee (Bowker 43).

The school, pictured below, remains locally known as “the working man’s Belvedere.”

The O'Connell Christian Brothers' School located in North Richmond Street as seen from above via Google Maps, 2013.
The O’Connell Christian Brothers’ School located in North Richmond Street as seen from above via Google Maps, 2013.