Places

“An Encounter” Route

This week’s featured place is not really one fixed place at all; it’s an entire route. In “An Encounter,” the narrator plans “a day’s miching” with his friends to skip school and go visit the Pigeon House (21). The video above is from the Google Earth version of the map and shows an approximation of the route taken first by the narrator alone and then with Mahony when the two meet at the Canal Bridge.

The Canal Bridge is the first clear reference point on the boys’ route. After the narrator and Mahony give up on Joe Dillon, they begin their journey: “We walked along the North Strand Road till we came to the Vitriol Works and then turned to the right along the Wharf Road” (23). The boys meander a bit around the industrial area before they board the ferry to cross the Liffey. Once across, they wander the streets of Ringsend before settling on a sloping bank of the Dodder. In all, the boys travel about 4.5 kilometers, but since parts of the text describe them walking about or wandering one area for a long time, they could easily cover much more ground than that.

Since Google Earth uses current satellite imagery (not historic), many of the buildings are no-doubt new constructions since the time of the story’s setting. The buildings on what could be the sloping bank, for example, don’t appear to be 100 years old and so probably would not have been there hindering the boys’ path. Still, the end of the route is, like the beginning of it, approximate. Since the text doesn’t specify streets once the travelers cross the river, and the geographic references are more vague, it isn’t clear just where exactly the boys finally have their encounter with the josser.

Even using an approximation, though, we can see the path the boys travel is in some ways similar to the path of “Araby’s” narrator. Both routes begin north of the Liffey near the Christian Brothers School. Both end south of the Liffey, and while they each end in different places south of the river, their two ending locations are connected by the line of the Dodder. Neither story includes a return route, but “An Encounter” suggests a hypothetical return via train.

Great Britain Street

This week’s featured place is Great Britain Street, where the priest of the “The Sisters” lives (or is lying dead, rather).parnellbritain

The street is particularly interesting in that shortly after the 1891 death of Charles Stewart Parnell, a leading Irish Nationalist, the name was changed from “Great Britain” to “Parnell” Street. This booklet published by the Dublin Civic Trust gives some more info on the history of this iconic street as well as its current thriving cultural significance. The booklet includes historical photos as well as building plans for store fronts. Although there’s no “Drapery,” in the diagram, one table shows that between 1845 and 1900, the number of “[c]lothiers, tailors, haberdashery, hosiery and drapery” businesses on the street fell from 17 to 6. The authors accredit this to “a decline in the quality of the street, away from the specialist uses of old towards a business community mainly serving the domestic demands of the local tenement population.”

Here’s the text of “The Sisters” where the street is referenced:

“The next morning after breakfast I went down to look at the little house in Great Britain Street. It was an unassuming shop, registered under the vague name of Drapery” (11).

Kingstown

Kingstown Harbor
“The Harbor, Kingstown. County Dublin, Ireland” from the Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsc.09881/

This week’s featured place is Kingstown, “a harbour, a town, a sea-front,” that appears several times in Dubliners. The suburban town, southeast of the city center, was called Kingstown only from 1821 to 1920. Today, it’s called Dún Laoghaire. It’s first mentioned in “After the Race,” as the place where Jimmy Doyle’s father “had made his money as a butcher in Kingstown and by opening shops in Dublin and in the suburbs he had made his money many times over” (43). It’s also the setting for the late night party on Farley’s yacht: “They took the train at Westland Row 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. There was to be supper, music, cards” (47).

The town is close to Monkstown, where Gabriel and Gretta of “The Dead” live. Many of Mary Jane’s student’s, we learn, live, if not in Kingstown, between Dublin center and Kingstown: “Many of her pupils belonged to the better-class families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line” (176). Gabriel & Gretta opt to stay in a Dublin hotel rather than make the long trek back to Monkstown after the party, but what of Mary Jane’s students? And the crew in “After the Race” reach Kingstown “in a few seconds.” Ah youth!Of course, many factors could be at play here. In “The Dead” it’s winter, and Gabriel is worried about Gretta catching cold like she had the previous year during the cab ride home. The fact that they would be taking a cab rather than a train is most likely attributable to the train schedule and the timing of the party. They leave the aunts’ house in the early morning hours, and the train would have certainly have stopped running, from the Westland Row station by then.

Downes’s Cake Shop

The first featured place of the week is Downes’s cake-shop, where Maria buys penny cakes in “Clay:”

Earl Street. photograph by Robert French from National Library of Ireland's digitized Lawrence Collection at http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000040954
Earl Street. photograph by Robert French from National Library of Ireland’s digitized Lawrence Collection at http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000040954

“She went into Downes’s cake-shop but the shop was so full of people that it was a long time before she could get herself attended to…She decided to buy some plumcake but Downes’s plumcake had not enough almond icing on top of it so she went over to a shop in Henry Street” (102).

Don Gifford places Downes’s at 6 Earl Street in Joyce Annotated, 1982. “Earl Street” by Robert French, pictured right, is part of the digitized Lawrence Photograph Collection at the National Library of Ireland.

Maria’s route takes her, via tram, from where she lives and works in Ballsbridge to the pillar, which she approaches from the south. There she disembarks and walks east along Earl Street to Downes’s and then west, past the pillar, into Henry Street. Then she returns to the pillar and heads north via another tram to Drumcondra. The cake-buying interlude effectively creates a cross out of her route, making this service a kind of religious pause before meeting with her brother and his family.