North Wall, the site of ships arriving and departing in Dublin, features in both “Eveline” and “A Little Cloud” as a place of frustrated dreams for their main characters. It’s where Eveline watches Frank set out for yet another adventure without her and where Little Chandler, eight years prior to the story’s setting, watches his friend Gallaher set off for a life he would come to envy. The place reference begins the story of “A Little Cloud” and begins the final movement of “Eveline:”
“Eight years before he had seen his friend off at the North Wall and wished him godspeed” (“ALC” 70).
“She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the passage over and over again.” (“E” 40)
In both cases, the main characters are contrasted with someone who gets to leave, and the fact that they have stayed or must stay in Dublin is the source of their paralysis. Their Dublin responsibilities, while offering a certain level of comfort, are also their bindings. The North Wall, which offers some the chance to escape, is yet another unassailable boundary for the likes of Eveline and Little Chandler.
The National Railway Museum has digitized this photo from its collections with the following description: “Sailing ships and steam passenger ferries at North Wall docks, Dublin, about 1906.”
North Wall can refer to the general area north of the Liffey and east of the canal or the North Wall Quay which spans the north wall of the Liffey from the Custom House to East Wall. In the case of both stories, it would seem to refer to the docks from which ships sailed, which are indeed along the quay. The photo above is from the National Railway Museum and shows “[s]ailing ships and steam passenger ferries at North Wall docks, Dublin, about 1906.” Many of the ships that would dock here would take their passengers to Liverpool or Holyhead. From there, they could travel anywhere in the world.
The Wharf Road appears in “An Encounter” as one of the first streets along the narrator and Mahony’s long route through Dublin the day they skip school in search of adventure. After Mahoney arrives at the Canal bridge where his friend our narrator has been waiting, the two “walked along the North Strand Road till [they] came to the Vitriol Works and then turned to the right along the Wharf Road” (22). Originally, they had “arranged to go along the Wharf Road until [they] came to the ships, then to cross in the ferryboat and walk out to see the Pigeon House” (21), but after they cross the Liffey and wander around Ringsend for a bit, they decide against the Pigeon House. They do trek along the Wharf Road all the way to the river, though, and have several encounters with other children and adults on the way.
Section of the 1883 Letts, Son & Co. Plan of the City of Dublin” map in David Rumsey’s online map collection. The road bordering the sea is the part of Wharf Road the boys traverse.
The Wharf Road, now East Wall Road, is a road that runs along the top of the wall built to keep the River Tolka on course on its way to the sea so that it doesn’t flood the city’s northern-eastern neighborhoods and industrial complexes. First, on the section of the Wharf Road that runs northwest to south-east, the boys encounter several children. Mahoney plays Indian and “chase[s] a crowd of ragged girls” (22). The boys are then accosted with stones and taunts by two other smaller boys defending the girls. Their siege against the other boys fails and they move on.
The picture, right, shows, toward the top, the part of the road that runs north-west to south-east, and then, along the right edge of the map, the section of the road that runs north and south just before it meets the Liffey. This is the part of the road where the boys begin “walking about the noisy streets flanked by high stone walls, watching the working of cranes and engines and often being shouted at for [their] immobility by the drivers of groaning carts” (22-23). Thus they move from navigating adversarial children to navigating adversarial adults (though they admit they incite the adversity), even before they cross the Liffey into the section of the city where the josser awaits. In this way, the Wharf Road represents a kind of microcosmic progression of the move from childhood to maturity that the story illustrates in a broader sense.
At the same time, the Wharf Road may also represent the technology and ability to control nature. The story contains references to several bodies of water. The canal, first, is a highly controlled body that the boys cross via a bridge. Then they approach the Tolka and stay well above it by way of the massive wall that keeps it en route to the sea. Once they reach the Liffey, larger than the Tolka though also fairly controlled by walls, they traverse it on a ferry, admitting the river a certain level of power not given to the waters they had navigated by dry bridge and road. The sea is described from a safe distance, though with an adventurous mystique as the narrator imagines the vast geography of the world beyond the sea. Finally, the River Dodder, over the ridge of a sloping bank, becomes the setting for the boys’ encounter with the josser. The liquidity that was so controlled and safely distant at the beginning of the story is now more unsuppressed and threatening. The Wharf Road, with its childish games and sturdy stone, even its harmless reprimands from adults, would seem a far safer and more secure location than the unfettered sloping bank of the Dodder with its strange inhabitants.
As soon as the narrator of “Araby” finally gets some money from his late-arriving uncle, he takes off down Buckingham Street on his way to the bazaar: “I held a florin tightly in my hand as I strode down Buckingham Street towards the station” (34). Buckingham Street is situated just southwest of the narrator’s residence. From his house in North Richmond Street, he must first go southwest into North Circular Road, travel southeast briefly to Summerhill, turn right, and then turn left into Buckingham Street. Once there, he must travel a quarter mile (.4 km) down the entire street until he reaches Amiens Street where the train station is located.
Section of Letts, Son & Co. 1883 Plan of the city of Dublin map showing the entire length of Buckingham Street and the Railway Terminus. Made available at the David Rumsey Map Collection online.
Buckingham Street, Dr. Ruth McManus and Ms. Sinead O’Shea suggest, “represents a microcosm of the city’s development from its initial layout by speculative landowners in the late 18th century ‘golden age’, through its largely middle-class residential status in the 19th century, its demotion to tenement use, then attempted rehabilitation in the late 20th century.” The narrator would have been traveling down this residential street a little after 9pm, and if his uncle is correct, the residents of the houses would have been “in bed and after their first sleep” already (34).
Things might have become a bit more lively as he approached the intersection of Buckingham, Amiens, and Montgomery Streets, though. Montgomery Street was part of “Monto,” the city’s red-light district. Though the boy would not have been in its midst, he would be right on the edge, an appropriate position as he teeters on adolescence. His entire trip, in fact, parallels the movement from childhood to maturity through its increasingly public and complex locations and it evolving modes of transportation (e.g. walking to train riding). Buckingham Street, with its transition from sleeping residents to soliciting women, becomes, to use McManus and O’Shea’s language, a “microcosm” of the revelations the boy experiences in his final epiphany.
South Great George’s Street Market. Photograph ca. 1865-1914 by Robert French, made available through the National Library of Ireland’s digitized Lawrence Photograph Collection
Not to be confused with The Stores on the same street, the City Markets were a collection of businesses housed inside a large building in South Great George’s Street. Essentially a shopping mall now named George’s Street Arcade, the City Markets were completed and opened in 1881. The project was commissioned in 1876 and was, according to Christine Casey’s Dublin: The City Within the Grand and Royal Canals and the Circular Road, an “ambitious covered market” to be designed by architects Lockwood and Mawson of England. When it first opened, none of the Dublin public were invited to the private ceremony, causing quite a controversy.
The spot figures only briefly in “Two Gallants” as a point of reference in Lenehan’s walk through Dublin while he awaits his friend Corley: “He left his friends at a quarter to ten and went up George’s Street. He turned to the left at the City Markets and walked on into Grafton Street” (58).
The lines forming the route of Corley and Lenehan, then Lenehan alone, in “Two Gallants.”
At this point in his route, Lenehan is about to complete the closing line of a gnomon-shaped path that he had begun when he first left Stephen’s Green on his solitary stroll. During his walk, he contemplates all the things that are missing from his life, and it’s only when he again reaches Stephen’s Green that he leaves off contemplating the emptiness and refocuses on the moment near at hand when he will reunite with Corley and learn whether his friend has been successful on his mission. The emotional gnomon is visually reflected in his path, and it’s on this last line of the gnomon when he begins moving more quickly, anxious to meet his friend and shut out the solitude. Is there a reason he moves so quickly here? Is there something other than the possibility of being late pushing him forward at this moment?
The City Markets as a landmark along the route offer complex interpretive possibilities. Naturally, the commercial nature of the place parallels the theme of materialism in the story as a whole. But approaching the reference historically begins to reveal other implications. Earlier in the story, Corley reveals that in an attempt to prove his unmarriagability to his lady friend, he offers to her the excuse that “[he] was out of a job…[because he] was in Pim’s” (51). As discussed in The Stores (aka Pim’s) post, Corley may be confusing Pim’s with the City Markets, which burned down in 1892 and weren’t restored until 1894. If Corley’s fabricated place of employment had burned, his unemployed state would make sense. However, it was not actually Pim’s that burned but the City Markets. And if the story is indeed set during the period of these two years, then when Lenehan turns left at the City Markets, he would be no doubt be confronted with the burnt out or blocked off facade of the building. Even if the story is set after, Lenehan might be confronted with the reminder of the fire through the renovated structure. Is he aware in this moment of his friend’s mistake? Was he always aware? And whether he is or isn’t aware of the inaccuracy, what does he think of his friend’s attempt to not only get out of marriage but also disingenuously elicit sympathy from the girl by making her think he was out of work due to a devastating fire? The underhanded duplicity isn’t unexpected of Corley, but when Lenehan is faced with the ruins or the repairs of the real disaster, what does it suggest that he hurries past, arriving in Grafton Street in the span of a single sentence? Is his indifference yet another sign of his complicity with Corley’s schemes? Does his lack of acknowledgment of Corley’s lies and manipulations at this moment in the story constitute a reversal of his moments-earlier desire to turn his life around?
Mentioned in both “Eveline” and “Two Gallants,” the Stores was actually a department store in South Great George’s Street. Don Gifford refers to it as “a small wholesale-retail empire” run by Pim Brothers Limited. Pictured below, the Pim’s Department Store was “designed by Sandham Symes and built in several stages by the Pim family from the mid 1850s onwards,” according to Archiseek. And Shaw’s 1850 Dublin Directory shows “Pim Brothers and Co., [at] 75-82 South Great George’s St (wholesale and retail linen and woollen drapers, silk mercers, hosiers and haberdashers).” Incidentally, one member of the prominent Quaker Pim family was Elizabeth Eveleen Pim.
1856 – Pim’s Department Store, Sth Great George’s Street, Dublin. From Archiseek, http://archiseek.com/2011/1856-pims-department-store-sth-great-george/#.UvORzUJdUQ5
Eveline, the young woman in Joyce’s story, works in the Stores to bring in income for her family. The place holds connotations of responsibility for Eveline, and it appears in direct contrast to her whimsical fantasies of running off with her lover Frank:
“Of course she had to work hard both in the house and at business. What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had run away with a fellow?” (37)
The Stores appear again in quite another context, as “Pim’s,” in “Two Gallants.” Corley boasts to Lenehan about his “slavey,” admitting that he essentially lied to her, telling her that he had worked in Pim’s and was now out of a job:
“Maybe she thinks you’ll marry her,” said Lenehan.
“I told her I was out of a job,” said Corley. “I told her I was in Pim’s. She doesn’t know my name. I was too hairy to tell her that. But she thinks I’m a bit of class, you know.”
There is no explanation in the story of how or why Corley would no longer work in Pim’s. However, the Times, London’s Annual Summaries [1851-1892] reports “the co-operative stores in Dublin were burned out” in 1892 (201). Corley would certainly have been out of work at Pim’s if it had recently burned down. The reference is still somewhat murky, however, since other accounts don’t place the 1892 fire at Pim’s, but rather at another well-known Great George’s Street shopping area, the City Markets. The markets, also referenced in “Two Gallants” as Lenehan makes his back to meet Corley after wandering the city, are a block north of the department store on the east side of the street. (The Market would be to the right of the diagram below.) Now called the George’s Street Arcade, the Markets, according to their website’s history, were originally opened with a large private luncheon that featured “the Chairman of the market company Mr Joseph Tod Hunter Pim.” Eleven years later, in 1892, a fire devastated the markets, but they were repaired and rebuilt in 1894.
Diagram for businesses in South Great George’s Street, including Pim’s Department Store.
Is it possible that Corley had been referring to the City Markets when he said he worked in Pim’s? The Pims were certainly prominent merchants in Great George’s Street and may have operated a shop in the markets in addition to their department store down the street. Or is Corley conflating Pim’s Department Store and the City Markets, ignorant of his mistake? If so, is it possible that his lady friend probably sees through his lies? Or is his immediate shift from “I told her I was out of a job” to “I told her I was in Pim’s” simply a non-sequitur, having nothing to do with the fire that could have understandably put him out of work temporarily? Is Joyce himself conflating Pim’s and the Markets?
In any case, there’s room for more study here. Among one of the more compelling literary implications is the idea that Corley, already a manipulative cad, is made even lower by his intent to garner sympathy for his lack of a job due to a devastating fire.
Not to be confused with the modern-day Spring Garden Street just south of the Liffey and George’s Quay, Spring Gardens, as it is referenced in “The Boarding House,” was an area well north of the Liffey, between the royal Canal and the River Tolka. Today, as Spring Garden Lane, it appears in the satellite view on the map to be a narrow half-auto-repair, half-residential street. It intersects with North Strand Road and is situated very near the path walked by the boys of “An Encounter.” Spring Gardens, or “Spring Garden” (no s) on the 1883 Letts, Son & Co. map below, is given as the nearest point of reference for where Mrs. Mooney sets up her first business: “She had married her father’s foreman and opened a butcher’s shop near Spring Gardens” (61).
Screenshot of the section of the 1883 Letts, Son & Co. “Plan of the city of Dublin” map containing North Strand Road. The road is under the blue line that indicates a tram route. Spring Garden, barely legible, is the street above Bay View Avenue and below the Chemical Works, connecting North Strand Road and Ballybough Road under the yellow line. Map available online through the David Rumsey Map Collection.
According to John Wyse Jackson and Bernard McGinley’s annotations, “Joyce originally wrote ‘in Fairview'” (53) rather than “in Spring Gardens” which would have put the shop north of the River Tolka, in a suburban neighborhood that houses, among other things, the oldest Jewish cemetery in Dublin, built in 1718. The Jewish colony around Fairview had their synagogue, however, down in the city center, at Marlboro Green (below), just off of Marlborough Street, where Mrs. Mooney plans to attend short-twelve mass. The connection between Fairview and Marlborough Street as references, then, becomes quite suggestive. The deleted reference removes further religious connotations from the already present tension between the story’s bells of St. George’s, which is a Church of Ireland, and Mrs. Mooney’s plans for attending Catholic mass.
1836 map of Dublin, showing Marlboro Green just northwest of the Custom House and east of Marlborough Street. Map by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Great Britain), available at the online David Rumsey Map Collection.
Marlborough Street no longer contained a synagogue by Joyce’s time. It had been closed in 1790, due to, as noted by Katherine Butler in “Synagogues of Old Dublin,” “the Jewish community being almost completely dispersed. By 1805 there were only three Jewish families in Dublin and by 1818 there were only two, numbering nine souls in all” (123). This dispersion was partially due, Butler explains, to the same decrees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that prohibited Catholicism. Mrs. Mooney, a Catholic moving from Spring Garden to Hardwicke Street to Marlborough Street on her path toward her Catholic church, is a significantly more enfranchised echo of the Jewish woman moving from Joyce’s deleted Fairview to the closed and converted synagogue.
As it is, Spring Gardens is a fairly innocuous reference. The shop had been near there, not exactly there. Yet the revision of the reference injects intriguing and suggestive currents underneath a story already rich in religious sub-text, subliminal as it may be.
Grafton Street in Dublin today is a chic, bustling shopping lane. In the time of James Joyce, it was, as Don Gifford describes, “a street of…fashionable shops” (54). Apparently, it has sustained its air of lively, happening nowness over the century and continues to be an energetic place to stroll. And stroll do the many characters in Dubliners. Grafton Street pops up five times in the book: twice each in “After the Race” and “Two Gallants,” and once in “Grace.”
Woman walking with dog on leash past Sibley & Co., stationers, Grafton Street. Photograph from the digitized Clarke Photographic Collection at National Library Ireland. Photo created 1897-1904? http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000168687
In “After the Race,” Grafton Street is the setting of much energy and society. The references to the street work to reify the “rapid motion through space” (44) that characterizes the story’s mood. First, it’s mentioned as a place in the distance, an exit direction for the car after Jimmy and Villona disembark and begin walking towards Jimmy’s father’s house:
“The car steered out slowly for Grafton Street while the two young men pushed their way through the knot of gazers” (45).
After the young men change clothes, they go back out into the busy Dublin evening and eventually meet their friends Segouin and Riviere, from the car, and run into Riviere’s friend Farley, a portly American:
“At the corner of Grafton Street a short fat man was putting two handsome ladies on a car in charge of another fat man. The car drove off and the short fat man caught sight of the party” (47).
Now a party of five, the young men eventually leave the bustle of the city center and head out to make their own bustle in private on Farley’s yacht, which is waiting in Kingstown Harbour.
Grafton Street has a completely different feel to it in “Two Gallants.” While still a crowded and vibrant locale, it’s in strong opposition to what Lenehan feels as he traverses its length from Stephen’s Green to College Green after which he continues north all the way to Rutland Square:
“He walked listlessly round Stephen’s Green and then down Grafton Street. Though his eyes took note of many elements of the crowd through which he passed they did so morosely. He found trivial all that was meant to charm him and did not answer the glances which invited him to be bold. He knew that he would have to speak a great deal, to invent and to amuse, and his brain and throat were too dry for such a task” (56).
After wandering, eating peas, and stopping to talk to some friends he has encountered, he finds Grafton Street again:
“He left his friends at a quarter to ten and went up George’s Street. He turned to the left at the City Markets and walked on into Grafton Street. The crowd of girls and young men had thinned and on his way up the street he heard many groups and couples bidding one another good-night” (58).
It is once the action around him begins to die down that Lenehan begins to perk up, going so far as to “set off briskly,…hurrying for fear Corley should return too soon” (59). Once he arrives at the meeting spot, “[h]is mind became active again.”
Man and woman standing outside Sibley’s Stationery Shop, Grafton Street. Photograph from digitized Clarke Photographic Collection at National Library Ireland. Photo created 1897-1904? http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000168914
If the reference to Grafton Street parallels the mood of “After the Race” and juxtaposes that of “Two Gallants,” it does something much more complex in “Grace.” In this story, Grafton Street is the location of the bar in which Mr. Kernan has his accident. It is this accident that sets in motion the events of the story. Once he is found, blood tricking from his mouth, at the foot of the stairs to the bar’s lavatory, he is carried up and laid on the floor of the bar. His friend Mr. Power comes to his aide and takes him outside:
“When they came out into Grafton Street, Mr. Power whistled for an outsider” (153).
The horse-drawn outsider finally delivers the two men to Mr. Kernan’s home in the Glasnevin Road, which isn’t exactly one road but a path by which one would get to the northwestern suburb. Mr. Kernan apparently lives somewhere along this path. The two locations are quite different of course. One is a central artery of the city, bursting with youth, money, and vitality; the other is a peripheral vein, quietly pulsing with family, beef-tea, and familiar “personal odour” (156). For Mr. Kernan, one is a dangerous place to be and the other a safe and nurturing place to be. Ironically, the public life story uses one of the most populous places in Dublin as a space that its main character cannot safely or successfully occupy.
Once Mahony finally arrives (and Joe Dillon doesn’t) at their meeting place, he and the narrator of “An Encounter” embark on their day’s journey. The two boys set off from the Canal Bridge and head northeast:
“We walked along the North Strand Road till we came to the Vitriol Works and then turned to the right along the Wharf Road” (22).
Screenshot of the section of the 1883 Letts, Son & Co. “Plan of the city of Dublin” map containing North Strand Road. The road is under the blue line that indicates a tram route.
The North Strand Road runs northeast from the Newcomen (Canal) Bridge to the East Wall (Wharf) Road on the south bank of the Tolka River. (It’s where the blue tram line appears on the map section above.) Charles Haliday’s The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin describes the area of the North Strand as it was depicted in a 1673 map by Sir Bernard de Gomme. According to the map, much of the east side of Dublin was under water after a major storm hit the city. Even when it wasn’t underwater, it was subject to flooding and only traversable by foot at low tide, according to Haliday’s fascinating accounts.
In Dubliners, North Strand Road marks the northeast boundary of the childhood stories. From the bridge to the Wharf Road, the boys walk 550 meters along North Strand, which would take approximately 7 minutes. The road is referenced only in “An Encounter,” a story that mentions several bodies of water. The boys begin at a bridge over the Royal Canal, walk along the Tolka, cross the Liffey, and end up on the bank of the Dodder. They also gaze out at the bay toward the Irish Sea.
St. George’s Church appears in “The Boarding House” through the sound of its bells pealing. The sound marks the time (just after 11 on a Sunday morning) as well as the location of the boarding house where Mrs. Mooney sits conspiring to collect her “reparations” from Bob Doran who has been carrying on an affair with her daughter Polly:
“The belfry of George’s Church sent out constant peals and worshippers, singly or in groups, traversed the little circus before the church, revealing their purpose by their self-contained demeanour no less than by the little volumes in their gloved hands” (63).
As the bells ring, Mrs. Mooney watches the maid clean up the remains of breakfast and thinks about the conversation she had had the night before with her daughter concerning the affair. Several minutes pass until:
“Mrs. Mooney glanced instinctively at the little gilt clock on the mantelpiece as soon as she had become aware through her revery that the bells of George’s Church had stopped ringing. It was seventeen minutes past eleven: she would have lots of time to have the matter out with Mr. Doran and then catch short twelve at Marlborough Street.” (64).
St. George’s Church, Dublin. Photograph by Robert French, published between 1880 and 1900, is part of the Lawrence Photograph Collection, available online through the National Library of Ireland.
Even though St. George’s is just steps away from the boarding house in Hardwicke Street, because she is Catholic, Mrs. Mooney intends to walk south and east 11 minutes to St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Marlborough Street for the shortest mass of the day. St. George’s, located at the top of Hardwicke Street, belonged to the Church of Ireland. The juxtaposition of these two denominations in such short textual proximity creates, on one hand, a kind tension between the religious values and doctrines of each church. For instance, divorce is forbidden by the Catholic church, but Mrs. Mooney, a Catholic, has already herself “gone to the priest and got a separation from [her husband] with care of the children” (61). Bob Doran, too, is confined by his association with the Catholic Church in that his confession to the priest the night before had put him in a state of acceptance for the imminent reparations he must make by marrying Polly. Additionally, his job in a Catholic wine merchant’s office is jeopardized by his sinful state, creating even more pressure for him to atone for his sins by getting married. If either of these characters were Protestant, not only could they more conveniently gain or retain their independence, they wold have a shorter walk to church on Sunday. The bells pealing behind Mrs. Mooney’s anxious plotting and Bob Doran’s regrets and self-doubt seem almost like a loud and clear, yet ultimately ignored, wake-up call.
On the other hand, the Church of Ireland and the Catholic Church are both set up against the notion of secularism and even atheism. Before facing Mrs. Mooney, Bob Doran recalls his youthful days when he “boasted of his free-thinking and denied the existence of God to his companions in public- houses” (66). Meanwhile, Mrs. Mooney is called a “Madam” and encourages, by omission of discouragement, her daughter to have “the run of the young men” (63) at the boarding house, which “was beginning to get a certain fame” (66).
As a structure and a dwelling, St. George’s has historically been perhaps as shaky as any religious doctrine the characters of “The Boarding House” might espouse. According to a 2009 Irish Times article, “[e]ven while St George’s was a church, the building was put to other uses and once had a bonded warehouse in the vaults in the cellar, which the congregation found somewhat hard to stomach.” The church was built between 1802 and 1814, and since then has undergone many changes. According to the same article, “the church became well known for an addition 22 years after it was built when that wide roof began to splay further than it should, due to the strain of the wide-span timber trusses. Civil engineer Robert Mallet, whose father ran an iron foundry, created cast-iron trusses to haul the church back into shape. Mallet knew about rocky foundations, being also an expert on earthquakes: he is credited with creating the word ‘seismology.'” Since Joyce’s day, the church has been a night club, a theatre, and an office building.
It’s also worth noting that the bells of St. George’s, as well as its steeple, also appear in Ulysses. Reciprocally, Bantam of Lyons of Ulysses makes a cameo in “The Boarding House” as another potential, though more difficult to acquire, suitor for Polly.
Near the end of “The Sisters,” we learn from Eliza that she, her brother Father James Flynn, and their other sister Nannie are all originally from Irishtown:
“But still and all he kept on saying that before the summer was over he’d go out for a drive one fine day just to see the old house again where we were all born down in Irishtown and take me and Nannie with him. If we could only get one of them new-fangled carriages that makes no noise that Father O’Rourke told him about, them with the rheumatic wheels, for the day cheap — he said, at Johnny Rush’s over the way there and drive out the three of us together of a Sunday evening. He had his mind set on that…. Poor James!” (16)
“Irishtown Road.” Irishtown, Dublin, Ireland. The photograph was published between 1890 and 1910 and is part of the Lawrence Photograph Collection available online at the National Library of Ireland.
There are several places in Ireland that carry the name “Irishtown,” and most likely, because of its proximity to the priest and his sisters’ home in Great Britain Street, Don Gifford identifies the reference as the Irishtown that is the “poor, working-class slum just south of the mouth of the Liffey and therefore east and south of Great Britain Street” (Gifford 34).
The location, however, could be more ambiguous than this obvious assumption. At the very least the reference holds ambiguous connotations. First, the general nature of the name parallels the general political implications of the earlier reference to Great Britain Street. That the priest was born in a house in Irishtown and died in an apartment above a Great Britain Street drapery shop brings up the ever-present theme of Ireland versus Britain in Dubliners as a whole.
Additionally, we might explore the alternative locations implied by the name Irishtown. At least two other Irishtowns existed as medieval periphery villages or sections of larger cities. These villages were home to people who identified as pre-Anglian Irish. One of these areas (pictured below) is what one history identifies as “probably the original town of Kilkenny,” in the shadow of St. Canice’s Cathedral (Murtagh and Patterson 5). A transcript of the Corporation Book of the Irishtown of Kilkenny, 1537-1628 provides a fascinating log of the rules for pricing materials as well as names of town officials, including the watchmen of the three city gates. According to the introduction, “The Corporation Book of the Irishtown, Kilkenny, has been known to historians at least since the time of Graves and Prim, who quote from it more than once in their History of St. Canice’s Cathedral (1857); in 1874 Sir John Gilbert, presumably with publication in view, had the greater part of it transcribed” (Ainsworth 3).
“Panorama as seen from St. Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny City, Co. Kilkenny.” Photograph was published between 1860 and 1883 and is part of the Stereo Pairs Collection online at the National Library of Ireland.
Another Irishtown, in Limerick, is part of the locale for the legend of the Brazen Head. According to legend as published in The Old Limerick Journal, “the women from the Abbey and the lrishtown were joining with the hard pressed garrison in repelling the Williamites” who were all defeated when, under the command of William of Orange (a figure also referenced in “the Dead”), they assaulted the Black Battery (Gleeson ?8).
While neither of these places, nor two others listed in Counties Antrim and Mayo, would have been comfortably accessible for a Sunday evening drive in a “new-fangled carriage…with rheumatic wheels” (such a carriage would have been a horse-drawn cart, making the journey between 7 hours [by bicycle] and 23 hours [by foot], according to the map), it is nonetheless characteristic of Joyce to inject layers of implication into such a seemingly simple geographical reference. It’s worth noting that another priest in Dubliners is connected with an ambiguous location as well. In “Eveline,” the unnamed priest in the photograph is said to have moved to Melbourne. It’s all Eveline’s father will say of him, and the vagueness of her father’s explanation (“[w]henever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word”) is enough of an intrigue to warrant her focus on the matter as something worth noting (37). “Melbourne” would most likely refer to Melbourne, Australia, but Melbournes also exist in England as well as Canada, a place Frank has been known to travel.
Basically, the reference to Irishtown in “The Sisters” is anything but a simple Sunday destination. It swells with political and historical implication and generates avenues of exploration among many other works by Joyce.
