Mapping Dubliners Project

Stephen’s Green

Editor’s Note: The following is the first guest contribution to the Mapping Dubliners Project. The author, Sarah Hoyt, is a senior at Erskine College and a student in Dr. Amanda Sigler’s James Joyce course. She graduates May 21, 2016 with a B.A. in English.

by Sarah Hoyt

St Stephen’s Green, known informally as Stephen’s Green or simply the Green, is a public park located in the heart of Dublin.

Historically, that stretch of land which would eventually become St Stephen’s Green began its life as a marshy plot. The website for Ireland’s Office of Public Works notes that the “name St Stephen’s Green originates from a church called St Stephen’s in that area in the thirteenth century” and that the area originally was used by the citizens of the city of Dublin to graze their livestock. However, in 1663 the plot of ground was decided by the City Assembly to be perfect for generating a consistent revenue for Dublin; twenty-seven acres were marked for the park and the remaining land was let after its division into ninety building lots. In The Joycean Way, Bidwell and Heffer explain that the “central portion was planted and lots… were distributed among some of the city’s more prosperous citizens. [The citizens] were not required to build, and for some time much of the south and east side was retained in agriculture and grazing” as it had been prior to its creation (140).

Nevertheless, according to Fargnoli and Gillespie in James Joyce A to Z, by 1670 the park was “enclosed for citizens to ‘take the open aire’” (196). Taking “the open aire” was presumably quite fashionable, and soon the wealthy of the city had fully taken over by moving in and claiming the location as distinctly their own. By the eighteenth century the park had been encircled by a host of Georgian mansions, and the “Beaux Walk situated along the northern perimeter of the park became a popular location for high society to promenade” (OPW).

Malton, James. St Stephen’s Green. 1796. Image Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Despite the initial clamor for residing in St Stephen’s Green by those who were rich and high-born, the park was neglected over much of the nineteenth century (Bidwell and Heffer 140). Though one effort in 1814 to beautify the park was raised, in which a “broken wall [was replaced] with ornate Victorian railings and… more trees and shrubs [were planted],” as well as “[n]ew walks… constructed to replace the formal paths previously found in the park” (OPW), overall the construction was considered a failure by the majority of Dubliners. With these improvements, the Green became a private park—in spite of the 1635 law decreeing the park “available for use by all citizens.” The 1814 move from an open to a private park “was widely resented by the public” (OPW).

Not until 1877 was St Stephen’s Green once more opened to the public. At the behest of Sir Arthur Guinness, later Lord Ardilaun, the Green was bought from its private owners and returned to the public. “[Sir Arthur Guinness] paid off the park’s debts and secured an Act which ensured that the park would be managed by the Commissioners of Public Works, now the OPW” (OPW). This done, Lord Ardilaun extensively relandscaped the park, adding not only trees and huge flowerbeds but a three-acre lake with a waterfall and a bridge, and enclosed the park in wrought-iron railings (OPW; Fargnoli and Gillespie 196). The new renovation, “[a]fter three long years of construction work” and expenditures of “£20,000” (OPW), was opened to the public on July 27, 1880. The public loved it immediately; it “quickly reemerged as a popular gathering place for Dubliners of all classes” (Fargnoli and Gillespie 196)—from the very rich to the very poor.

French, Robert. St Stephen’s Green, Dublin City, Co. Dublin, c. 1900. Image Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

It is important, nonetheless, to bear in mind that St Stephen’s Green in Joyce’s time was considered to be “[a] sizable public park in a fashionable section of east-central Dublin,” as Gifford points out in Joyce Annotated (54). Knowing both the contemporary and the historical context of the park can help readers to better grasp what Joyce may have meant by inserting St Stephen’s Green into “After the Race” and “Two Gallants.”

In “After the Race,” the main character in the story, Jimmy Doyle, and his wealthy foreign friends—jubilant because of their success in the race—make their way across the park:

“The young men strolled along Stephen’s Green in a faint cloud of aromatic smoke. They talked loudly and gaily and their cloaks dangled from their shoulders. The people made way for them” (Joyce 46).

Bidwell and Heffer argue that, in “After the Race,” Joyce may be using St Stephen’s green as a metaphor to evoke the “‘corruption’ which Stephen senses pervading Dublin” (50). As Stephen’s Green is “associated with the rich and sophisticated in Dublin” (Bidwell and Heffer 125), Joyce may been seen as referring to St Stephen’s Green because he is attempting to strip the walk that the characters are taking of its illusory extravagance and instead display the underlying and repulsive corruption that lies behind the wealth of the main characters.

Detroit Publishing Co. St Stephen’s Green Park, Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland (LC-DIG-ppmsc-009877), c. 1890-1900. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

In “Two Gallants,” the mood surrounding St Stephen’s Green is sombre, as Lenehan and Corley—and then only Lenehan, alone—walk from the road into the park:

“The two young men [Lenehan and Corley] walked up the street without speaking, the mournful music following them. When they reached Stephen’s Green they crossed the road [to enter the Green itself]. Here the noise of trams, the lights and the crowd released them from their silence” (Joyce 54).

“He [Lenehan] walked listlessly round Stephen’s Green. . . “(56).

Although the tone surrounding St Stephen’s Green seemingly differs in the two works, the meaning in both cases points toward corruption. Here, the corruption is not so much of wealth as of “treachery” (Bidwell and Heffer 50). The fact that “several scoundrelly characters are associated with the area” bolsters this notion of treachery (50). Captain O’Shea, who “betrayed the relationship between [Charles Stewart] Parnell and Kitty O’Shea, attended the university at 86 Stephen’s Green” (50). This address was also home to Buck Whaley, acceptor of a £4,000 bribe to vote against his own political party and a “boon-companion to Francis Higgins,” who nefariously contributed to suppressing the Rising of 1798; Higgins himself “lived at 82 St Stephen’s Green” (50).

This list of scoundrelly characters from Irish history is only furthered by the actions of Lenehan and Corley near St Stephen’s Green—like the characters who lived there before them, Lenehan and Corley are scoundrels steeped in the same “decadent commingling of greed, peremptory self-righteousness, and sexual intrigue” that their historical predecessors exhibited (according to Donald Torchiana, quoted in Bidwell and Heffer 84). Lenehan and Corley’s insertion into St Stephen’s Green draws attention to the “historical associations” of “the debauchery, perfidity and false nobility” of Dublin (Bidwell and Heffer 84). St Stephen’s Green, for Joyce, is then merely another metaphor for the layers of corruption, greed, falsity, and treachery that paralyse all the characters in his Dubliners.

Works Cited

Bidwell, Bruce and Linda Heffer. The Joycean Way: A Topographic Guide to Dubliners & A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with Maps and Photographs. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Print.

“Cultural Heritage: St Stephen’s Green.” The Office of Public Works. Web. 14 Apr 2016.

Fargnoli, A. Nicolas, and Michael P. Gillespie. James Joyce A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.

Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Print.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Robert Scholes and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1967. Print.

Johnny Rush’s

In the opening story of Dubliners, Eliza, the sister of the just-deceased Father James Flynn, regrets that the family never fulfilled James’s wish to go visit the old house in Irishtown before his death. She explains to the young narrator and his aunt that

“…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” (17).

"Railway Station Cab-stand, Killarney, Co. Kerry." This photo, from the digitized Lawrence Photograph Collection at the National Library of Ireland, shows typical late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century carriages like the one Father Flynn and his sisters might have rented or that Gabriel and Gretta would have hired to take them to the Gresham. — “Railway Station Cab-stand, Killarney, Co. Kerry.” This photo, from the digitized Lawrence Photograph Collection at the National Library of Ireland, shows typical late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century carriages like the one Father Flynn and his sisters might have rented or that Gabriel and Gretta would have hired to take them to the Gresham.

The trip from the northern side of Dublin to what Don Gifford calls “a poor, working class slum just south of the mouth of the Liffey” (34) would not have taken long at all, especially considering the narrator of “Araby” travels an even greater distance, from North Richmond Street to nearly Sandymount, alone at night by foot and train, and that the boys in “An Encounter” also walk a much greater distance, from the Royal Canal to Ringsend, in an afternoon. But while the young narrators of the childhood stories are active and mobile, the priest and his elderly sisters would require more structure and accommodation for their trip. In fact, Father Flynn had planned to rent

“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…at Johnny Rush’s over the way there and drive out the three of us together of a Sunday evening” (17).

Don Gifford identifies Johnny Rush’s as a “cab and car proprietor” operated by Francis “Johnny” Rush. And indeed, Thom’s 1892 directory lists a Francis Rush at 10 Findlater’s place under the category “Carriage, Cab, and Car Proprietors.”

Page 1876 of Thom's 1892 Directory showing Francis Rush (penultimate listing) as a carriage, cab, and car proprietor. — Page 1876 of Thom’s 1892 Directory showing Francis Rush (third to last listing) as a carriage, cab, and car proprietor. Worth noting is that a few pages after this is the draper category, which lists six drapers in Great Britain Street.

Findlater’s Place is half a block south of Great Britain (now Parnell) Street just off of Marlborough Street. The three aging siblings would have been able to walk to Johnny Rush’s to get their carriage and from there drive down to Irishtown, about 4.5 km (2.8 miles) fairly easily. According to the Google map, it would take 45 minutes to walk and 16 minutes to bike the route. The pneumatic wheels, or “rheumatic wheels” as Eliza calls them, would make the trip more pleasant as they were “tyre[s] filled with compressed air,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which cites the Freeman’s Journal, or “Freeman’s General” as Eliza calls it, as explaining “[t]here is every reason to expect that a large business can be done in fixing the Pneumatic Tyre to the wheels of carriages, invalid chairs, etc.”

Definition and quotations for "pneumatic tyre" in Oxford English Dictionary online. — Definition and quotations for “pneumatic tyre” in Oxford English Dictionary online.

Another implication of the word “pneumatic,” and Eliza’s express non-saying of it, involves spiritual matters, an idea explored more thoroughly by Bernard Benstock in Narrative Con/Text in Dubliners. In his study, he posits the potential correlation between the names of Johnny Rush and Father O’Rourke and the Old and New Testaments. And while internal spiritual and psychological readings of Dubliners spaces abound, it is also worth exploring the external geographical and technological implications of the reference to Johnny to Rush’s.

Google map section showing Johnny Rush's (center), between Great Britain Street (top) and the Gresham Hotel (bottom). — Google map section showing Johnny Rush’s (center), between Great Britain Street (top) and the Gresham Hotel (bottom).

When viewed on the map, it is clear that Johnny Rush’s in Findlater’s Place is right in between Great Britain Street, the first explicitly defined setting in Dubliners where the priest and his sisters live, and the Gresham Hotel, the final setting of the last story in Dubliners. At the intersection of the first and last setting markers sits the carriage and cab proprietor, reifying the importance of transportation and its manifestations to the whole of Dubliners. Whereas the first story describes a hypothetical cab ride that was never taken because of a character’s death, the final story ends with an actual, though problematized, cab ride to the Gresham where Gabriel learns about his wife’s past lover, long dead and buried yet still powerfully present. While many of the stories in the collection include transportation ranging from cab to tram to train, after Mrs. Sinico is killed by a train in “A Painful Case,” all transportation stops, until, in the opening scene of “Grace,” Mr. Kernan climbs into a cab, bloody and unable to speak due to his injuries. Then, the two cabs in “The Dead” are hard to come by and imbued with possibly violent connotations. Ultimately, Gabriel and Gretta’s cab ride to the Gresham, as opposed to their home in Monkstown which would have taken them past Irishtown, is a kind of reminder of the opening story’s imagined cab ride. And the proximity of the first and final settings, further foregrounded by Johnny Rush’s cab, car, and carriage proprietor right in between them, calls attention to the critical importance of geographical space and the methods of traversing it that James Joyce so carefully delineates in Dubliners.

Bewley’s

At the end of “A Little Cloud,” Chandler sits “in a room off the hall, holding a child in his arms” (82). He has just returned home, rather depressed, from an anticlimactic meeting with an old friend who is visiting Dublin after having lived abroad for the past eight years. Gallaher has filled Chandler’s mind with stories of Berlin, Paris, London, and all the romanticism of not-Dublin, and in his “revery” (74), Chandler has forgotten to do his domestic duty of picking up coffee for his wife Annie. So while he holds his baby, his wife goes to the corner to buy tea instead:

“It was a quarter to nine. Little Chandler had come home late for tea and, moreover, he had forgotten to bring Annie home the parcel of coffee from Bewley’s…She said she would do without any tea but when it came near the time at which the shop at the corner closed she decided to go out herself for a quarter of a pound of tea and two pounds of sugar” (82).

The reference to Bewley’s, though seemingly innocuous, carries connotations in tandem with the ongoing Ireland-England dichotomy in the story. One of the persistent themes in Dubliners, and in “A Little Cloud” especially, is Ireland’s dependence upon and subordinance to the yoke of English economy. One of Chandler’s dreams, for example, is to become a poet, but he forms his poetic identity on the basis of English critics whom he imagines would “recognise him as one of the Celtic school by reason of the melancholy tone of his poems” (74). He has essentially conceded his Irishness as a kind of commodity for English consumption and critique. His friend’s emigration to England where he has become successful in the London Press weighs on Chandler, and he views his own life with “dull resentment.” He feels trapped by the passionless, hate-filled eyes of his wife and his mean little house (83).

Although it is unclear who operates the corner shop where Annie goes for the tea, it is very clear who runs Bewley’s. According to the business’s history, Samuel Bewley established his tea and coffee business in 1835, when he “dared to break the East India Company’s monopoly by importing 2,099 chests of tea on board the clipper ship The Hellas, the first ship chartered directly from Canton in China to Dublin.” The family sustained the business, opening shops in Dublin, including one in Dame Street, which Gifford notes would be the most likely location implied in the story as it is situated along Chandler’s route from office to bar. It would have been just a few steps away from City Hall, where Chandler would be turning into Dame Street from Parliament Street after crossing Grattan Bridge.

As an Irish company that challenged a British monopoly, the reference to Bewley’s infuses a subtle rebellion against the seemingly insurmountable English economic oppression of Ireland that fills the pages of the story. Nevertheless, Chandler simply forgets to make this stop, implicating him in his own imprisonment to the British capitalism that he feels has trapped him.

Nassau Street

Nassau Street is referenced only once in Dubliners. It appears early in “Two Gallants” as one of the avenues Corley and Lenehan traverse on their way from a public house in Dorset Street, in the north part of the city, to the area of Stephen’s Green in the south, a journey of over 1.5 miles (2.5 km) that would take roughly 30 minutes to walk, according to the map. Nassau Street runs along the southern edge of Trinity College, connecting Grafton Street in the west and Kildare Street in the east. The young men’s path takes them past the gates of Trinity College (which face west), which they reach at “twenty after,” around the corner and along Nassau Street, and then into Kildare Street.

Nassau Street, with Trinity's railings in view. Photographed between 1890 and 1910 by J.J. Clarke. From the National Library of Ireland's digitized Clarke Photographic Collection. — Two women walking in opposite directions, on Nassau Street, with Trinity’s railings in view. Photographed between 1890 and 1910 by J.J. Clarke. From the National Library of Ireland’s digitized Clarke Photographic Collection.

Although the pair have been talking and joking as they walk, by the time they reach this section of the trip, conversation meets resistance and then stops. Just after Lenehan notes the time from the clock above the college entrance, he questions Corley about whether he will be able to “pull it off all right,” referring to Corley’s looming task of meeting his girl and soliciting money from her, and Corley responds with agitation: “I’ll pull it off, he said. Leave it to me, can’t you?” (53) But “his brow was soon smooth again” and then, though they continue in silence, the text situates them on Nassau Street:

“They walked along Nassau Street and then turned into Kildare Street” (54).

The absence of conversation continues all along Kildare Street until they cross the street bordering Stephen’s Green and reach the park.

Nassau St, junction with Kildare St, Dublin. Photographed between 1880 and 1900 by Robert French, from the National Library of Ireland's digitized Lawrence Collection. — Nassau St, junction with Kildare St, Dublin. Photographed between 1880 and 1900 by Robert French, from the National Library of Ireland’s digitized Lawrence Collection.

Prior to the eighteenth century, Nassau Street was known as St. Patrick’s Well Lane. The name was a reference to a well that St. Patrick, a patron saint of Ireland, allegedly conjured up nearby on what is now the college grounds. As Frances A. Gerard explains in his Picturesque Dublin: Old and New, St. Patrick’s Well Lane was thus named because “here a miracle was performed by the great Irish saint, who, moved at the sufferings endured by the inhabitants from a dearth of fresh water (the Liffey being even then in bad repute), struck the earth with his staff in the name of the Lord, and on the spot a splendid fountain of purest water ran. This fountain was crowded on St. Patrick’s Day by water-drinkers” (164). The well, which dried up in 1729, according to Gerard, was “the subject of a poem written by Swift, in which he represents St. Patrick reproaching England: ‘Where is the holy well that bore my name? / Fled to the familiar brook from whence it came'” (165). The poem features the voice of St. Patrick revoking his patronage in response to what Swift saw as the demise of morality in Ireland.

The poem was written in 1726, at which time, according to Gerard, the street was yet to be renamed in honor of King William III of England and Ireland and of the Orange-Nassau House. C.T. M’Cready suggests the name Nassau Street was in use by 1756, 54 years after the end of William’s reign (77).Although Dutch Prince of Orange by birth, succeeding his father William II of Orange, he was also the son of King Charles’s daughter Mary and challenged James II of England for the crown during the Glorious Revolution. A Protestant, he led the ultimate defeat of James at the Battle of the Boyne. His statue stands, incidentally, just west of the entrance to Trinity College, and even though it isn’t directly mentioned in “Two Gallants,” it does appear in “The Dead” as the center of Gabriel’s story involving his grandfather’s (also named Patrick) apparently Orangist horse that can’t help but walk circles around old “King Billy” (D 208).

The Battle of the Boyne further entrenched the Protestant Ascendency, and many of the street names in Dublin reflect it. Although he does not note the street’s previous name, Donald Torchiana, who explores in detail the significance of street names in his “Joyce’s ‘Two Gallants’: A Walk through the Ascendancy,” alludes to the fairly obvious connotations of Nassau Street’s name by simply remarking “Nassau Street instantly recalls the Prince of Orange, who later presided over Ireland’s defeat at the Battle of the Boyne and perpetuated the broken Treaty of Limerick” (119).

Indeed, in a story so full of geographical references, explicit and implied, political and historical, there seems to be much still to unpack. For example, is there a reason Joyce has his gallants fall silent at the approximate moment they pass what would have once been St. Patrick’s Well on a street whose name has been changed to commemorate a Dutch-English conquerer? Is it important that this silence continues as they turn into and walk along Kildare Street, where a harpist plays “Silent, O Moyle,” a song whose lines include “Yet still in her darkness doth Erin lie sleeping, /Still doth the pure light its dawning delay. / When will that day-star, mildly springing, /
Warm our isle with peace and love?”

To add a further layer of intrigue to the street’s reference, a James Joyce Centre “On This Day” post recalls the well-known fact that on June 10, 1904 Joyce met the woman he would spend his life with on Nassau Street. Whether he saw Nora Barnacle clearly or sketchily (a subject the post examines briefly), he was inspired to speak to her. He struck up a conversation with Nora and the two agreed to meet for a proper date. That date would, of course, eventually be commemorated in Ulysses, which takes place entirely in that one day, June 16, 1904, a day now widely known and celebrated as Bloomsday.

Theatre Royal

The Theatre Royal appears in only one of the Dubliners stories. It’s the topic of conversation briefly in “The Dead” as the party guests eat dinner and discuss local shows and musical performances:

“The subject of talk was the opera company which was then at the Theatre Royal. Mr. Bartell D’Arcy, the tenor, a dark-complexioned young man with a smart moustache, praised very highly the leading contralto of the company but Miss Furlong thought she had a rather vulgar style of production. Freddy Malins said there was a Negro chieftain singing in the second part of the Gaiety pantomime who had one of the finest tenor voices he had ever heard” (198).

The Theatre Royal is one of three major early-twentieth-century Dublin theatres, along with the Gaiety and Queen’s Theatres, referenced in Dubliners. Though other theatres and venues appear in the stories, Dear Dirty Dublin: A City in Distress, 1899-1916 by Joseph V. O’Brien lists only these three as serious theatres as opposed to music halls or production sites for varieties and “local amateur adventures into serious drama” (45). Seamus Reilly, however, takes issue with O’Brien’s “hierarchical reading of ‘high’ and ‘low’ music” (12) as well as his limited definition of theatres, arguing in “James Joyce and Dublin Opera: 1888-1904,” that, in fact, Dublin had several theatres and music venues which were every bit as culturally significant as the “serious” theatres O’Brien identifies. A full list of various Dublin theatres and venues, including those like the Tivoli and others mentioned in Dubliners, can be found in John Finegan’s “Dublin’s Lost Theatres.”

Rather than just an august title for a venue, the title “Theatre Royal” indicated a patent from the British monarch, establishing it as an official and legal place to put on serious plays. The designation was historically mandated by the 1786 “An Act for Regulating the Stage in the City and County of Dublin” for venues to legally show “serious” plays, and the patent also meant that performances at the theater would have been heavily censored. Thus, while venues like the Gaiety, which Freddy Malins brings up during the conversation, and the Tivoli might produce pantomimes, farces, or burlesques, the milieu of the Theatre Royal was typically seen as more serious in nature. Don Gifford even explains that “[t]he Theatre Royal was primarily used for dramatic presentations, the Gaiety for the more socially prominent musical events, and the Queen’s for the productions that fit neither category” (99). Indeed, within Dubliners, James Joyce does represent the theatres according to Gifford’s categorization by placing the opera at the Royal, the pantomime at the Gaiety (both referenced in “The Dead”), and a possibly satirical production of the opera Maritana at the Queen’s (in “A Mother”).

Screenshot of the map showing the Theatre Royal just west of Mulligan's Pub. — Screenshot of the map showing the Theatre Royal just south of the Liffey and west of Mulligan’s Pub.

The Theatre Royal existed in several iterations on the same site beginning in 1821, and prior to that another Theatre Royal stood, fell, and was rebuilt in Smock Alley, just a block away from the Misses Morkan’s house in Usher’s Island. By the time the Morkans and their guests critique the theatre’s most recent opera in late 1903 or early 1904, though, the structure that stood in Hawkins Street, just steps away from Mulligan’s in Poolbeg Street, was Dublin’s second Theatre Royal to stand on that particular site. The first had burned down in 1880, and the second had only recently reopened in 1897. A recent biography of Mulligan’s Pub contains some interesting history, including the fire, and anecdotes involving theatre performers and patrons.

Joseph V. O’Brien laments that “[t]he great days of the Theatre Royal ended with its demise in 1880 [when it was] burned to the ground” (45). During its “great days,” it did indeed carry the reputation described by both O’Brien and Gifford. But when the theatre reopened in 1897 it became home to a much greater variety of performances, whether for better or worse. Owing perhaps largely to the expanding boundaries of entertainment, the eclectic tastes of Dublin’s populace, and the limited number of theatres with room enough to seat a large audience and accommodate numerous performers, the Theatre Royal featured not only opera, but also, according to an appalled O’Brien “wrestlers, performing dogs, and mumming birds” (46). O’Brien concedes, though, that the Royal did uphold its reputation as a major serious theatre in the city due to performers like Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and the diva Melba, as well as theatre and opera companies like Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s company and the Moody Manners company. John Wyse Jackson and Bernard McGinley note in their edition of Dubliners that it would have in fact been the Moody Manners Opera Company that performed during the Christmas season at the Theatre Royal.

The Moody Manners Company was one of several popular opera companies that made regular appearances in Dublin during the time “The Dead” is set. A few of the more prominent ones were the Carl Rosa Company, which Seamus Reilly explains “played exclusively in the Gaiety Theatre;” the Rouseby Company; and the Moody Manners Company, which performed primarily at the Theatre Royal. According to “The Moody-Manners Partnership,” a 1958 article in Opera magazine that chronicles the company’s history, the England-based company formed in 1898, just one year after the reopening of the Theatre Royal “with a young chorus, entirely without previous stage experience” (Graves 560). The company was in danger of shutting down due to lack of money, but thanks to a huge turnout at their production of The Daughter of the Regiment in Dublin at none other than the Theatre Royal, they instead flourished. “The tide had turned,” explains Perceval Graves, “[t]henceforward it was all plain sailing” (560).

Seamus Reilly’s list of operatic performances in Dublin between 1888 and 1904 (published in Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce) identifies the only Moody-Manners production in December of 1903 as that of Carmen. Therefore, when the dinner guests discuss the “opera company which was then at the Theatre Royal,” they would most likely have indeed been talking about this company and this production. Joyce, an avid opera-goer and singer, may himself have even seen the shows that season. Opera was extremely popular in Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century, and Reilly explains “[t]he love of opera was due to the love of music generally, but opera also represented a chance to hear serious music and remain culturally connected to the developments in European music” (9). Despite Gabriel’s non-participation in the dinner conversation such continental concerns would have certainly interested him. Undoubtedly it’s Molly Ivors’s recent chastising of his lack of Irish pride coupled with Lily’s scurrying about that keeps him from joining in the dialogue.

The Moody Manners Company performed one opera in December 1903 and several in January 1904. Because “The Dead” is most likely set between New Year’s Day and January 6, 1904, the group is most likely discussing a December performance. Although the The Moody Manners Company performed Carmen, another company put on the world premiere of Muirgheis, an Irish opera by Thomas O’Brien Butler, at the Theatre Royal that same month. The premiere took place on December 7, 1903, but according to Axel Klein’s “Legends in Irish Opera” in the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloqium, even though “[t]he opera was acclaimed as the first to have a libretto in the Irish language…at its first performance an English text was used and the Irish translation by Thadgh O’Donoghue was printed beside the English words” (44). Klein claims the opera was not very well received, and he notes reviewers couldn’t find much in the work to praise even though they wanted to, if only because it was “so thoroughly Irish” (qtd. in Klein 45). However, the introduction to the vocal score, which was published in 1910 by Breitkopf & Härtel, insists the premiere was produced “with great success.”

The opera’s argument, which is embedded below from the 1910 published score, explains that the story involves a love triangle between a man and two sisters. Muirgheis, which in Irish means “magic of the sea,” is the lead and is intended to be played by a soprano, while Muirgheis’s sister, Maire, is to be sung by a contralto. In “The Dead,” Bartell D’Arcy “praise[s] the leading contralto.” Although the soprano is technically the lead, he may be referring to whomever played Maire in the production. In the end, Maire, consumed by guilt and still unloved by Diarmuid, drowns herself but is turned into an ocean wave by Donn who decrees “The wind shall drive thee shoreward mid the foam, But never bring thee home…Thou shalt not die. This doom I give.”

A page from the 1910 publication of Butler's Murgheis vocal score. — A page from the 1910 publication of Butler’s *Murgheis* vocal score.

The other performance the guests may be referring to is Carmen, an opéra comique by Georges Bizet. The lead role of Carmen, whom Harold Schonberg likens to Don Giovanni in that “she dies for a principle” (107), is meant to be sung by a mezzo-soprano, a range only slightly higher than contralto. Carmen would have been perhaps more likely to elicit a response like Miss Furlong’s, which is that she “had a rather vulgar style of produciton,” especially since it’s possible she was played by Maria Gay. Gay was considered, beginning in 1902 with her premiere in the role, one of the best Carmens of her time. In one 1907 review, the author argues that “[i]if she were never to improve on her Carmen it would nevertheless, in the opinion of many conservative London critics, be the most commanding representation of the character since it was conceived by its author generations ago” (168) and that “her voice has an immense range. The lower register is as grand as the diapason of a church organ, while her upper notes are clear and full as the trill of a lark” (167). Another review in 1908 asserts “Maria Gay remains the only real Carmen before the opera-going public” (442). By this time she was well established, but it’s possible in 1903 that without such widespread acclaim, Miss Furlong could have found her style vulgar. Such a critique, though, may have been more aimed at the character herself rather than the singer, although it is said that Gay ate an orange on stage before Habanera. Below is a recording of Gay singing the Habanera from Carmen.

Both Carmen and Muirgheis feature female leads, not altogether common in opera, but which nicely suits some of the themes of “The Dead.” While the story begins as Gabriel’s, the narrative is wrested from him by Gretta, who, at the end, tells the most powerful story perhaps in all of Dubliners. Like the River Shannon, named after a powerful mythical female, and which is referenced late in the story, the unnamed yet implied references to Carmen and/or Maire invoke the underlying current that flows under the story, that while the story may be about the man, it is told and ultimately controlled by the woman.

And even though Carmen may be the more well-known opera to be performed that December at the Theatre Royal, the possibility of the Irish Muirgheis adds to that polarity between European and Irish that permeates not just “The Dead,” but Dubliners as a whole. Surely it isn’t just coincidence that these two operas, one written in English and Irish and the other in French (though often performed in English), reify the recent dispute between Gabriel and Miss Ivors, which he is sulkily reviewing in his mind at just this moment. In true Joycean style, the puzzle, itself only observable by considering the place referenced, becomes a way to read the story.

Update 11 Sept. 2024: Thanks to Mel Cousins for pointing out that the 1843 Theatres Act (referenced in the initial version of this article) was not applicable to Dublin theaters, as they were still under the authority of the 1786 Act for Regulating the Stage in the City and County of Dublin. The error has been corrected.

Port and Docks

This photo of the North Wall shows some of the docks and ports along the eastern end of the Liffey. Photographed by Robert French between 1865 and 1914. From the National Library of Ireland's digitized Lawrence Photograph Collection. — This photo of the North Wall shows some of the docks and ports along the eastern end of the Liffey. Photographed by Robert French between 1865 and 1914. From the National Library of Ireland’s digitized Lawrence Photograph Collection.

Not technically a place, the Port and Docks, now simply known as Dublin Port, was originally established in 1707 as the Ballast Board and has been headquartered at various places along the Liffey according to the shoreline of the river’s mouth as it opens into the Irish Sea. The earliest ports in Dublin were associated with the Viking establishment centered at Dublin Castle, and the ports have moved continually downstream as a result of the management of the river’s banks with the building of the South Wall in 1715 and the Bull Wall on the north shore in 1842. By the time James Joyce referenced the Port and Docks as the employer of Gabriel’s father T.J. Conroy, they were an organization whose main industry and activity happened along the North Wall of the Liffey at the eastern edges of Dublin:

“They both kissed Gabriel frankly. He was their favourite nephew, the son of their dead elder sister, Ellen, who had married T.J. Conroy of the Port and Docks” (179).

We never learn what T.J. Conroy did for the Port and Docks, “which was responsible for both the port of Dublin and for all the lighthouses around the Irish coast.” An 1883 Letts, Son, and Co. map shows the various yards, works, and buildings housed between the Custom House in the west and the mouth of the Liffey in the east.

A section of an 1883 Letts, Son, and Company map of Dublin showing the eastern end of Liffey between the Custom House and the river's mouth. Along the north bank are the main docks and port industrial complexes. — A section of an 1883 Letts, Son, and Company map of Dublin showing the eastern end of Liffey between the Custom House and the river’s mouth. Along the north bank are the main docks and port industrial complexes.

One of the Port and Docks’s preeminent figures was Bindon Blood Stoney, who began work at the Ballast Board (as it was then called until it was renamed in 1869) in 1856 as assistant to the chief engineer. He advanced quickly, and by 1862 he replaced his successor as chief engineer and began implementing a method he had been developing to convert half of the city’s quays to deepwater quays. According to the Dictionary of Irish Architects (linked above),

“Stoney described his method in a paper, ‘On the construction of harbour and marine works with artificial blocks of large size’, delivered to the Institution of Civil Engineers in London in 1874, which gained him the Institution’s Telford Medal and Premium for that year. The method was used for the extension of the North Quay and the construction of the Alexandra Basin and for the foundations of the North Bull lighthouse. Stoney also introduced a more efficient system for dredging the shipping channel within the harbour, designing hopper barges of unprecedented capacity to carry the dredgings out to sea. Other works which he designed included the rebuilding of Essex and Carlisle Bridges and the construction of the Beresford (or Butt) Swing Bridge. He also was reponsible for introducing a graduated pensions scheme for his workers.”

When Carlisle Bridge was rebuilt in 1876, it was renamed O’Connell Bridge, a bridge Gabriel and Gretta cross later in “The Dead” on their way to the Gresham Hotel after his aunts’ party in Usher Island, one of the westernmost quays along the Liffey. According to Dublin: The City within the Grand and Royal Canals and the Circular Road with the Phoenix Park, “[Stoney] virtually trebled the width of the bridge to match that of O’Connell Street, and levelled the approaches by substituting broad elliptical arches for the original semicircular spans” (694).

The North Bull Lighthouse, the foundation of which was constructed by Bindon Blood Stoney, chief engineer of the Dublin Port and Docks from 1862 to 1899. The North Bull Lighthouse (Graham Hogg) / CC BY-SA 2.0

At the very least, because of Stoney, we know T.J. Conroy would probably have a satisfactory pension from his time at the Port and Docks, and Gabriel and Gretta’s crossing of the Liffey would be smooth and, as the text verifies, uneventful other than the cab occupants’ observation of Daniel O’Connell’s statue as they emerge on the north side of the Liffey. It’s perhaps also worth noting that early in the same story, we learn that Gabriel’s aunts, before moving into the house where the story is mostly set in Usher’s Island, lived with their brother Pat in “Stoney Batter” (both pictured below), an area that is labelled Stoneybatter on both an 1836 and 1883 map. Since the name appears on an 1836 map of Dublin, though, it’s not likely that the area was named after Bindon Blood Stoney. Nevertheless, the combination of the story’s references to several quays, Stoney Batter, O’Connell Bridge, and the Port and Docks makes it impossible to not encounter Bindon Blood Stoney while researching these places.

A section of an 1836 map showing "Stoneybatter" (as opposed to "Stoney Batter" as indicated in "The Dead") just north of Usher's Island. — A section of an 1836 map showing “Stoneybatter” (as opposed to “Stoney Batter” as indicated in “The Dead”) just north of Usher’s Island.

Monkstown

Monkstown, a suburb of Dublin, is approximately 6.5 miles (10.5 km) southeast of the city center. It sits on the coast of the Irish Sea, nearDún Laoghaire, which was Kingstown at the time James Joyce wrote “The Dead,” the only story in Dubliners that references Monkstown. In that final story of the collection, Monkstown is identified as the home of Gabriel and Gretta Conroy, the story’s main characters who are attending Kate and Julia Morkan’s annual Christmas-season dinner and musical exhibition:

“–Gretta tells me you’re not going to take a cab back to Monkstown tonight, Gabriel, said Aunt Kate” (180).

In The History of the County of Dublin, John D’Alton describes Monkstown as “a locality, not perhaps in itself either town or village, but surrounded by elegant villas, noble demesnes, and tasteful bathing lodges, and withal on the threshold of Kingstown” (864). This 1838 history, published in Dublin, chronicles, among other things, the establishment of Monkstown, an area known historically as Carrickbrennan. The earliest record D’Alton describes, in a style almost Finnegans-Wake-ean, is from 1174:

“In 1174 King Henry the Second, by charter, confirmed to the Abbey of the Blessed Virgin all their lands in Carrickbrennan, (the more ancient name of this locality,) Carrickvecon, &c., with all their appertenances, and all shipwrecks that might happen on their lands, together with soc and sac, tol and them, infangenthef and outfangenthef, and all liberties and free customs” (867).

After the sixteenth-century dissolution of the monasteries, much of the land of Monkstown, including three turrets, a monastery, orchard, abbey, and cemetery, were granted in 1546 to John Travers, Master of Ordnance. In 1638 the castle was built, and its ruins are still in tact. According to the Castle Hunter blog, which photographs and briefly describes many Irish ruins, this particular castle’s ruins, “sitting on the edge of a roundabout [, …] are the last thing you would expect to come across” in the area.

By 1640, through marriage and inheritance, Walter Cheevers had possession of most of these lands, but, according to D’Alton’s history, he was “indicted for adhering to the rebels in 1641” (869), and the Irish papist was exiled for a time to County Galway before being restored to his property in Monkstown. Thus, like Gretta in “The Dead,” who is from Galway, this Monkstown resident bridges west and east Ireland.

Monkstown Church, exterior, Monkstown, Co. Dublin. Photograph by Eason and Son, between 1900 and 1939. From the digitized Eason Photograph Collection at the National Library of Ireland. This is not the original abbey connected to the churchyard, but a rebuild of a church originally established in the area in 1789.

One of the primary historical features of Monkstown is its churchyard, which is the burial site for many shipwreck victims, including “the unfortunate officers and soldiers of the 97th Regiment, who perished in the … Rochdale transport-ship in 1807” (D’Alton 865). The Rochdale, as well as the Prince of Wales, both crashed into the coastal rocks during a storm on November 18, 1807, and many of the wrecks’ victims washed onto shore in Monkstown. The wreck prompted the building of the nearby Kingstown Harbour (now Dún Laoghaire Harbour). In his description of the cemetery and its monuments, D’Alton cites Joseph Addison, who “on a similar occasion” of reading names on tombstones, commented “when I see kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind” (qtd. in D’Alton 866). Like Gabriel at the end of “The Dead,” who imagines “the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried” and who watches the “snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (223-24), D’Alton and Addison were struck by the smallness of humanity against the imposing monolith of history.

A train moving through Monkstown, 1880-1900. The photograph by Robert French is part of the Lawrence Photograph Collection at the National Library of Ireland,

Perhaps the most important historical developments for Monkstown was its railroad, which, in 1837, connected the area to the Dublin city-center and established it as a suburb of the city. The distance between the bustling center and the seaside neighborhood was now easily traversed. In fact, the young men in “After the Race” travel by train from Westland Row station to Kingstown, just a bit further from Dublin than Monkstown, “in a few seconds, as it seemed to Jimmy” (47). But by the time the Morkans’ party was winding down, the trains would most likely have stopped running, and according to late-nineteenth-century Eaton’s Diaries, trams only ran generally from about 8:30am to 11pm. The only method of transportation available to Gabriel and Gretta for a return home would have been a private cab.

Salthill Railway station, people, including girl with pram, Monkstown, Co. Dublin. Photographed between 1860 and 1883. From the digitized Stereo Pairs Photograph Collection at the National Library of Ireland.

But instead of taking a cab home after the party, the Conroys have reserved a room at the Gresham, a nice hotel in Sackville (now O’Connell) Street in the city center. The reason seems plain enough when Gabriel replies to Aunt Kate:

“–No, said Gabriel, turning to his wife, we had quite enough of that last year, hadn’t we? Don’t you remember, Aunt Kate, what a cold Gretta got out of it? Cab windows rattling all the way, and the east wind blowing in after we passed Merrion. Very jolly it was. Gretta caught a dreadful cold” (180).

Gabriel’s concerns are logical given the circumstances of time and place. Don Gifford notes that the story is set sometime between January 2 and 6, 1904 (Gifford 110), and a cab ride to Monkstown from Usher’s Island quay would have taken the couple along the coast for part of their journey, where the “east wind blowing in” would have been from the Irish Sea. Not only is it winter, it’s also very late when the party ends and the guests finally leave. In fact, it’s actually morning when Freddy Malins stands outside hailing cabs for the departing guests:

“The piercing morning air came into the hall where they were standing so that Aunt Kate said:

–Close the door, somebody. Mrs. Malins will get her death of cold” (206).

Once they’re all outside, the cold and dark of the scene are re-emphasized:

“The morning was still dark. A dull, yellow light brooded over the houses and the river; and the sky seemed to be descending. It was slushy underfoot; and only streaks and patches of snow lay on the roofs, on the parapets of the quay and on the area railings. The lamps were still burning redly in the murky air and, across the river, the palace of the Four Courts stood out menacingly against the heavy sky” (212-13).

Even though Monkstown was closer than ever before because of its connections to the city by train, tram, and cab; the late hour, the chill of the season, and even possibly the holiday transportation timetables keep the couple in the urban center even though their thoughts turn to remoter locations like Galway and the Aran Isles and the Shannon Waves and the “children… [and] household cares” in Monkstown (214).

Shelbourne Road

Inside of the Beggars Bush Barracks, photographed by Robert French between 1865 and 1914. From the National Library of Ireland's digitized Lawrence Photograph Collection. — Inside of the Beggars Bush Barracks, which was located at the corner of Shelbourne Road and Cranmer Place, photographed by Robert French between 1865 and 1914. From the National Library of Ireland’s digitized Lawrence Photograph Collection.

Shelbourne Road, located in the southeastern suburban part of Dublin, is referenced in “Counterparts” as the place where Farrington exits the tram on his way home. He has just finished his frustrating impromptu pub crawl, and now, out of money and “full of smouldering anger and revengefulness” (96), he makes his way to his home through what Don Gifford describes as “a district of lower-middle-class homes and tenements” (76).

“His tram let him down at Shelbourne Road and he steered his great body along in the shadow of the wall of the barracks. He loathed returning to his home” (97).

The tram he takes home serves the same or a similar route to the one Maria might travel in the next story to get home to Ballsbridge from her brother Joe’s house in Drumcondra. An 1883 map, a segment of which is pictured below, shows the tram routes as blue lines. Though the map omits the eastern part of the route, it appears that the tram would have turned left into Cranmer Place as it headed southeast out of the city center and then made its way back toward the city through Ballsbridge along Northumberland Road. Farrington exits at Shelbourne Road which is the first major intersection after the tram turns into Cranmer Place. He then walks southeast towards his house which, according to this map, could be located in or around Landsdowne Road.

A section of the 1883 Letts Son & Co. map of Dublin. The blue lines indicate tram routes, the red railways, and the yellow municipal boundaries. Full map available at the online David Rumsey Map Collection.

Shelbourne Road is, according to C.T. M’Cready’s 1892 Dublin Street Names, Dated and Explained, one of many Dublin streets named after noblemen (vii). M’Cready explains the street was named for William Fitzmaurice, 2nd Earl of Shelburne and Marquis of Landsdowne. And prior to the tribute to the Earl of Shelburne, the street was known as Artichoke Road and Great-Britain Quay (117).

Section of pg. 117 of C.T. M'Cready's 1892 Dublin Street Names, Dated and Explained. The entire book is available online at https://ia802605.us.archive.org/32/items/dublinstreetnam00cregoog/dublinstreetnam00cregoog.pdf — Section of pg. 117 of C.T. M’Cready’s 1892 *Dublin Street Names, Dated and Explained*. The entire book is available online.

Farrington’s walk down Shelbourne Road takes him past the Beggars Bush Barracks, and the text does indeed acknowledge that “his great body” moves under “the shadow of the wall of the barracks” (97). Until it was transferred to Michael Collins in 1922, the barracks belonged to the British Army. There is a kind of sinister aggression connoted in the shadow of the barracks, and its implications only further fuel the aggression also building in Farrington as he gets closer to his house and the son he will eventually assault. Much of Farrington’s rage, in fact, seems a kind of subconscious response to British occupation. His economic state and position as a scrivener to a “north-of-Ireland” solicitor, his being snubbed by the attractive London woman, and his recent loss at arm wrestling to a possibly English Weathers (who complains at one point that the party’s “hospitality was too Irish” []) all contribute to Farrington’s growing frustration. The British military barracks occupying the corner of his neighborhood, on a street named after a British earl, would only add to his sense of oppression, and the story ends with him ultimately reacting in kind by bullying someone in a position of dependence upon him.

Queen’s Theatre

The Queen’s Royal Theatre, which operated from 1844 to 1907 and 1909 to 1969, appears in “A Mother” as a venue where one of the artistes once performed. The theatre, often called simply the Queen’s Theatre or the Queen’s, was characteristically known as a venue for comic and musical acts. It was one of several popularly attended theatres in Dublin during this period and was located near the Antient Concert Rooms, at 209 Great Brunswick Street (now Pearse Street). The reference to The Queen’s Theatre occurs while Kathleen Kearney and her parents are at the Antient Concert Rooms on the final night of the grand concert series. As Kathleen is preparing for her performance as accompanist for the various singers, her mother confronts the managers of the concert about her daughter’s promised compensation. When Mrs. Kearney is unable to find either Mr. Holohan or Mr. Fitzpatrick, the show’s organizers, she returns to the dressing room as the artistes are arriving:

“The artistes were arriving. The bass and the second tenor had already come. The bass, Mr. Duggan, was a slender young man with a scattered black moustache. He was the son of a hall porter in an office in the city and, as a boy, he had sung prolonged bass notes in the resounding hall. From this humble state he had raised himself until he had become a first-rate artiste. He had appeared in grand opera. One night, when an operatic artiste had fallen ill, he had undertaken the part of the king in the opera of Maritana at the Queen’s Theatre. He sang his music with great feeling and volume and was warmly welcomed by the gallery; but, unfortunately, he marred the good impression by wiping his nose in his gloved hand once or twice out of thoughtlessness. He was unassuming and spoke little. He said yous so softly that it passed unnoticed and he never drank anything stronger than milk for his voice’s sake” (142).

Don Gifford describes the Queen’s Theatre as a kind of catch-all venue for acts that didn’t quite fit the Theatre Royal’s usual “dramatic presentations” or the Gaiety’s “socially prominent musical events” (Gifford 99). The theatre apparently resisted being called a music hall, though, as evidenced by an 1875 clipping from the Era Almanack, pictured below.

An entry in the 1885 Era Almanack describing the Queen's Theatre. Image from http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/Dublin/QueensTheatreDublin.htm with credit to the Sensation Press. — An entry in the 1885 Era Almanack describing the Queen’s Theatre. Image from http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/Dublin/QueensTheatreDublin.htm with credit to the Sensation Press.

The theatre was built in 1844 on the site of the former Adelphi Theatre and, according to Archiseek, rebuilt in 1909 by R.J. Stirling. According to another history, one that focuses on the theatre in the context of the “popular and immensely successful song writer, composer, playwright, comedian, and Music Hall performer” Arthur Lloyd, the theatre was remodeled in 1893 as well. Since the stories of Dubliners all take place around the turn of the century, and Mr. Duggan is described as a young man, we can conceive that his role in Maritana is somewhat recent and thus perhaps after the 1893 remodeling. Perhaps the production was an attempt by the theatre at more dramatic or serious fare than its usual farces, comedy acts, pantomimes, music hall performances, and “melodramatic fare” that Joyce loved as much as his operas and serious concerts (Foster 149).

A more intriguing possibility is that Joyce is placing in this story an ironic reference to a very different kind of performance. According to Allardyce Nicoll’s A History of Late Nineteenth Century Drama, the Queen’s Theatre in Dublin put on a production of Miss Maritana, a burlesque opera by Lieutenant George Nugent and J.W. Whitbread, who co-managed the theatre, on April 21, 1890. The reference to this burlesque revisioning of William Vincent Wallace’s dramatic opera would indeed be a clever–though, for Joyce, not wholly insulting– jab at the self-envisioned serious artistes of Mr. Holohan’s failed grand concert series. Together with the mousy and unknown London-based Madam Glynn, the jealous and nervous bronze-medal-winning Mr. Bell, and the apparently gullible Kathleen Kearney, the burlesque opera star is in appropriate company. Indeed, reading the reference to Maritana in combination with the reference to the comparatively misfit Dublin theatre, we can find yet another instance of Joyce’s lens of scrupulous meanness sustained in every layer of this story.

In 1969, the theatre, like many Dublin theatres, was demolished.

Queen's Theatre, after it became home to the Abbey Theatre group in 1951. Image from Archiseek. — Queen’s Theatre, after it became home to the Abbey Theatre Company in 1951. Image from Archiseek.

Chapelizod Bridge

Very few of the Dubliners stories contain settings very far from the city center. The most significant deviation from this norm is “A Painful Case,” which features the suburb of Chapelizod as the main character’s place of residence. The opening of the story announces this setting in tones much like those of the central character Duffy himself:

“MR. JAMES DUFFY lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious. He lived in an old sombre house and from his windows he could look into the disused distillery or upwards along the shallow river on which Dublin is built” (107).

More the most part, James Duffy follows a rigid daily routine:

“He had been for many years cashier of a private bank in Baggot Street. Every morning he came in from Chapelizod by tram. At midday he went to Dan Burke’s and took his lunch — a bottle of lager beer and a small trayful of arrowroot biscuits. At four o’clock he was set free. He dined in an eating-house in George’s Street where he felt himself safe from the society of Dublin’s gilded youth and where there was a certain plain honesty in the bill of fare” (108-109).

But on one particular evening, after his routine has been interrupted by the news of his friend Emily Sinico’s death, he visits a different public house, one much nearer his home than his usual haunts. Though Duffy initially reads of his friend’s demise in the paper in his George’s Street eating house, he has to go elsewhere to process the news. First he goes home to Chapelizod where he rereads the story by the dim light of his bedroom window, which overlooks the Lucan road, the distillery, and the Liffey. He becomes unsettled and nervous and leaves his house to get some fresh air:

“The cold air met him on the threshold; it crept into the sleeves of his coat. When he came to the public-house at Chapelizod Bridge he went in and ordered a hot punch.

The proprietor served him obsequiously but did not venture to talk. There were five or six workingmen in the shop discussing the value of a gentleman’s estate in County Kildare They drank at intervals from their huge pint tumblers and smoked, spitting often on the floor and sometimes dragging the sawdust over their spits with their heavy boots. Mr. Duffy sat on his stool and gazed at them, without seeing or hearing them. After a while they went out and he called for another punch. He sat a long time over it. The shop was very quiet. The proprietor sprawled on the counter reading the Herald and yawning. Now and again a tram was heard swishing along the lonely road outside.

As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two images in which he now conceived her, he realised that she was dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. He began to feel ill at ease. He asked himself what else could he have done. He could not have carried on a comedy of deception with her; he could not have lived with her openly. He had done what seemed to him best. How was he to blame? Now that she was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night alone in that room. His life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory — if anyone remembered him” (116).

It takes a change of scenery for Duffy to feel sympathy for his friend, whom only shortly before he had perceived as “unfit to live, without any strength of purpose, an easy prey to habits, one of the wrecks on which civilisation has been reared” (115). He had been appalled, in fact, when he first learned of her death. But once he is in the pub near his house, drinking hot punch on a cold November night, he feels much closer to her and regrets that neither one of them could fill the loneliness they both felt in life. Though she was married, her husband was often abroad and Duffy had been the closest thing to a companion she had had. She also had been comforting to him, an unmarried though not necessarily unromantic man who seems unwilling to confront his sensual potential.

That the name of Chapelizod invokes the love story of Tristan and Iseult only adds to the depth of his despair at realizing Mrs. Sinico is gone. Perhaps it is the unnamed pub only distinguished in the story by its location at the Chapelizod bridge, with its connotations of romance and history, that offers Duffy the ability to feel tenderly.

The pub itself is identified by Don Gifford as the Bridge Inn. Although the current Bridge Inn’s website claims it wasn’t built until 1911, the 1900 Thom’s Directory clearly lists a Mr. T. Walker, grocer, wine and spirit merchant, at Bridge Inn in the south side of Chapelizod (see bottom middle column in the screenshot below). The Bridge Inn, just on the south bank of the Liffey is not the same pub as the famous Mullingar’s featured in Finnegans Wake, and which was a favorite spot of Joyce’s father John who knew the owner there, Robert Glenthorn Broadbent, also listed in the directory below.

Screenshot of a digitized 1900 Thom's DIrectory. The page shows entries for Chapelizod. Note Mr. T. Walker of Bridge Inn near the bottom of the middle column. Also, note Mr. Robt. Glenthorn Broadbent at the top left. He is purportedly a friend of Joyce's father, John Joyce. Broadbent ran the Mullingar House, another Chapelizod pub, which features in Finnegan's Wake. Directory made available online by South Dublin County Libraries, http://source.southdublinlibraries.ie/handle/10599/5105 — Screenshot of a digitized 1900 Thom’s DIrectory. The page shows entries for Chapelizod. Note Mr. T. Walker of Bridge Inn near the bottom of the middle column. Also, note Mr. Robt. Glenthorn Broadbent at the top left. He is purportedly a friend of Joyce’s father, John Joyce. Broadbent ran the Mullingar House, another Chapelizod pub, which features in Finnegan’s Wake. Directory made available online by South Dublin County Libraries, http://source.southdublinlibraries.ie/handle/10599/5101