Category: Uncategorized

Wellington Monument

Long shot Wellington Memorial, Phoenix Park, Dublin City, Co. Dublin. From the National Library of Ireland's The Stereo Pairs Collection, featuring the work of photographers James Simonton and Frederick Holland Mares. http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000564051
Long shot Wellington Memorial, Phoenix Park, Dublin City, Co. Dublin. From the National Library of Ireland’s The Stereo Pairs Collection, featuring the work of photographers James Simonton and Frederick Holland Mares. http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000564051

A figure of the tension between English and Irish, the Wellington monument stands, for Gabriel in “The Dead,” as a longed-for alternative to the cramped and perceptibly judgmental space of the Morkans’ party just after Molly Ivors declares him a West Briton. As he shifts his attention to the impending speech, Gabriel longs to be outside in the cold open air:

“How cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument. How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper-table!” (192)

Geographically, the monument resides in Phoenix Park, a locale often referenced in “A Painful Case.” It’s about 1.5 kilometers walking distance from Usher’s Island, where the party is. To Gabriel at this moment, the site represents an escape from his own responsibility to his hosts and fellow guests, a retreat to solitude and exteriority. Politically, though, the place marker signifies a part of Gabriel that perhaps longs to be free of Irish responsibility.

The Wellingotn Monument is an obelisk commemorating the military accomplishments of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. He was an Irish born British statesman and highly esteemed and decorated military leader who eventually served as Prime Minister. Thus, in many ways, the Duke of Wellington embodies Gabriel’s position as Irish and British, and his desire to retreat to the monument expresses his desire to overpower the polemics of the recent argument with Molly Ivors, though in perhaps a militaristic and even phallic way.

The monument is mentioned again, but before it is, we get a detailed and rather militaristic description of the food and wine arranged in the dining room. Bottles of stout are “squads” in uniform, and “[i]n the centre of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one containing port and the other dark sherry.” The pyramid might be compared to the obelisk as the interior monument to public life.

Gabriel envisions the monument again just before he begins his speech:

“In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres.

He began:

–Ladies and Gentlemen,” (202)

The reference here recalls the image that he initially uses to consciously shift his thoughts away from the argument with Miss Ivors and on to his approaching speech. Its placement here is partially a reminder of that shift and perhaps also a kind of invoking of the muse of the duke who, as Commander in Chief of the British Army, would certainly possess skill in public speaking. Some of these speeches, in fact, were collected by George Henry Francis in Maxims and Opinions of Field-Marshal His Grace the Duke of Wellington, Selected From His Writings and Speeches During a Public Life of More Than Half a Century. The public life, the life of speech-making and strategizing, towers like an obelisk for Gabriel. It looms as much in the crowded warmth of Usher’s Island as it does in the cold snowy night.

Ringsend

Close-Up of Ringsend on an 1883 Letts, Son & Co. Map of Dublin. Available at David Rumsey Collection Online.
Close-Up of Ringsend on an 1883 Letts, Son & Co. Map of Dublin. Available at David Rumsey Collection Online.

Ringsend is a small suburb of Dublin located on the south shore and east end of the Liffey. It’s where the narrator and Mahony spend the final stage of their school-skipping journey and where they meet the josser. At first, the two only see the area from a distance, from north of the river, which could be interpreted as a safe position compared to the yet unknown dangers that lurk on the other side:

“We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce — the barges signalled from far away by their curls of woolly smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay” (23).

At this moment Mahony, anticipating “Eveline’s” Frank, gets the idea to “run away to sea on one of those big ships.” And anticipating the effects of the largeness of the world on Eveline, the narrator “[sees], or imagine[s], the geography which had been scantily dosed to [him] at school gradually taking substance under [his] eyes.” Though this sentiment isn’t expressed directly in “Eveline,” her paralysis on the North Wall is certainly due to the substantial geography swirling in her mind when her imagined travels present themselves as impending reality.

In “An Encounter,” the boys do board a boat, albeit a simple ferry to the other side of the river. Once there, they watch the sailors for a while before continuing their travels:

“When we were tired of this sight we wandered slowly into Ringsend” (23).

The original plan had been to take the South Wall all the way out to the Pigeon House, but by the time they spend their money in Ringsend on biscuits, chocolate, and raspberry lemonade and chase a cat through a lane and into a field, they decide to just plop down on a sloping bank and watch the Dodder flow by. This is where they encounter the strange man who casts an unexpected shadow over their adventures.

While Ringsend itself is nonthreatening and rather mundane, because of its position across the river, it represents an unfamiliar and rather adult world. As with “Araby,” which also ends on the south side of the Liffey, the ending of “An Encounter” suggests a foray into adolescence, one that is not followed by an actual return home (though one is suggested) to the safer north bank. Incidentally, Araby would have been only slightly south of the boys’ position at the end of “An Encounter,” and the train they would be taking home would be the same one the narrator of “Araby” would take to get home from the bazaar.

Canada

A harbour at Montreal in1874 from the Customs House. Alexander Henderson / Library and Archives Canada / PA-149728. From http://www.theshipslist.com/pictures/montreal1874.shtml
A harbour at Montreal in1874 from the Customs House. Alexander Henderson / Library and Archives Canada / PA-149728. From http://www.theshipslist.com/pictures/montreal1874.shtml

While many of Joyce’s references are unquestionably exact, even down to the address or the name of the establishment, others are dauntingly vague. For example, the reference to Canada in “Eveline,” at first glance seems expansive, especially as it refers to Frank’s adventures in Eveline’s limited perspective:

He had tales of distant countries. He had started as a deck boy at a pound a month on a ship of the Allan Line going out to Canada” (39).

Canada also serves as the birthplace of Andre Riviere in “After the Race:”

“They were Charles Segouin, the owner of the car; Andre Riviere, a young electrician of Canadian birth; a huge Hungarian named Villona and a neatly groomed young man named Doyle” (42-43).

In “After the Race,” the reference serves partly as an emphasis on the international overtones of the story.  The young men in the story come from all over the Western hemisphere and converge in Dublin in celebration of youth, energy, and speed.

A country spanning 9.98 million square kilometers is, as a geographic reference, quite a deviation in scale from, say, Mulligan’s pub in Poolbeg Street. Its magnitude is consistent with the general internationalism of “After the Race” as well as Eveline’s perception of all the far-away worlds Frank inhabits. In Eveline’s case, it would make sense that, to her, Canada is just Canada, a vast world contained within a single word. However, Frank is probably only familiar with a small part of the country, and it’s one of four major cities that serve as the ports for the Allan Line.

The Allan Line was a shipping company in service from 1854 to 1911. (After 1911, it merged with another company.) It sailed between North America, Europe, and South America (including “Buenos Ayres”) and was operated by a Canadian shipping family based in Quebec. Of its several steam ship routes between 1854 and 1917 (when its merger with Canadian Pacific Line was made official), five served ports in Canada:

  • 1854 – 1917 Liverpool – (Moville) – Quebec – Montreal (summer)
  • 1854 – 1903 Liverpool – (Halifax) – Portland (winter)
  • 1861 – 1917 Glasgow – St. John’s NF – Quebec – Montreal.
  • 1871 – 1892 Liverpool – Queenstown – Halifax – Norfolk – Baltimore.
  • 1888 – 1917 London / Havre – Quebec / Montreal – St. John, NB (winter)

from The Ships List

The Ships List website lists all of the Allan Line ships that would have sailed those routes and features several photographs of the ships as well as the ports. “[Frank] told [Eveline] the names of the ships he had been on,” but the names aren’t mentioned in the story. Incidentally, though, one of the ships was the Bohemian, a name correlating with The Bohemian Girl opera referenced only a few sentences before the Allan Line reference in the story. The ship, however, was only in operation for five years before it sank off the coast of Maine in February of 1864, killing 20 people. The ship’s life would most likely predate Frank’s time as a deck boy. Other ships included the Brazilian, Parisian, Prussian, and St. Andrew, to name just a few.

While in the case of “Eveline,” the reference to Canada may seem at first vague and even intimidating, it is actually no more vague than the references in the same story to place like Buenos Ayres, Melbourne, Belfast, or the Straits of Magellan. What seems to be a reference to an entire country is really a reference to only a few possible port cities off of the Atlantic Ocean. To Eveline, though, it’s a world away from the world that holds her tightly in its grip.

Belfast

Royal Avenue, Balfast, Antrim. Photograph from the National Library of Ireland's Eason Photographic Collection. Dated 1900-1940.
Royal Avenue, Balfast, Antrim. Photograph from the National Library of Ireland’s Eason Photographic Collection. Dated 1900-1940.

Belfast, now the capital of Northern Ireland, was in Joyce’s day an industrial center that generally, partly because its population depended on its industry, opposed Home Rule. In Dubliners, the city appears in three stories: “Eveline,”  “Clay,” and “Grace.” That the adolescence, maturity, and public life sections all reference Belfast, while the childhood section omits it, may be of some interest in terms of the political implications of the place as they would manifest in the psychology of the stories’ inhabitants. In other words, a young child would be most likely uninterested in, if not unaware of, the simmering anxieties associated with Belfast. But perhaps more importantly, with the exception of “The Sisters,” none of the childhood stories reference places outside of Dublin at all, and in “The Sisters,” the outside references pertain to the priest. The first-person child-as-narrator in the other two stories has very little concern for anyone or anywhere outside his own orbit.

In “Eveline,” Belfast is the home of the man who had built the new houses on Eveline’s street: “One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children. Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it — not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs” (36). The slick new houses built by the man from Belfast serve as a source of disrupted memory for Eveline, whose adolescence and approaching adulthood are already being colored by materialism fast overtaking the simple pleasures of playing in a field.

In “Clay,” Belfast is where Maria’s purse was purchased: “She took out her purse with the silver clasps and read again the words A Present from Belfast. She was very fond of that purse because Joe had brought it to her five years before when he and Alphy had gone to Belfast on a Whit-Monday trip” (100). Moving beyond Eveline’s vague association, Maria’s awareness of Belfast is as a commercial center and a place where one would go on Whit-Monday (the day after Pentecost, usually in May or June, observed as a public holiday in Ireland until 1973). For her, Balfast is thus a sentimental association with Joe, albeit one that sustains the materialism of Eveline’s association since it is both a money holder and a purchased gift.

“Grace” employs Belfast in connection to the Kernans’ success as parents: “Her two eldest sons were launched. One was in a draper’s shop in Glasgow and the other was clerk to a tea-merchant in Belfast” (156). Glasgow, known in the Victorian period as the “Second City of the British Empire,” not only rivaled Belfast in terms of industry and commerce but also carries political implications. If in the previous two stories Belfast only conveyed commercial connotations, here, set alongside Glasgow, the “Second City of the British Empire,” Belfast becomes a politically charged reference, controversial, perhaps, in Joyce’s use of it as a destination for successfully raised children.

Even though none of the stories attach Belfast explicitly to the political tensions of Ireland and the British Empire, the implications resonate–first at the level of rumor, then sentimental materialism, and finally commercial, vocational, and parental accomplishment.

Two Gallants Route

One of the longest and most intricate routes in Dubliners is contained in “Two Gallants.” Though the “After the Race” route spans roughly 17 kilometers (10.6 miles), and “Two Gallants” only about 8.4 km (5.25 mi.), the former is traveled via various methods of transportation while the latter is traversed entirely on foot. Unlike “After the Race,” which features a comparatively  straight line from west to east, “Two Gallants” is full of winding, doubling-back, circling, and zig-zagging. Fading the map slightly, the route looks like this:

 

The lines forming the route of Corley and Lenehan, then Lenehan alone, in "Two Gallants."
The lines forming the route of Corley and Lenehan, then Lenehan alone, in “Two Gallants.”

One striking feature of the geometrical funhouse that it is this route is the pseudo-gnomon in the vicinity of Great George’s Street. “Gnomon,” of course, is one of three words (along with “simony” and “paralysis”) that the narrator of “The Sisters” finds fascinating. It can be defined, in the Euclidean sense, as a parallelogram missing a smaller parallelogram from one of its corners. Here is a diagram and deeper explanation of gnomon. The gnomon reference in”Two Gallants” is quite invisible in a strictly textual reading, but surfaces beautifully with the aid of a map,  a seemingly natural supplement to a story with so many geographic references and whose action is heavily informed by the location of the character(s) at any given moment. If the visual cue on its own isn’t entirely convincing, we might consider Lenehan’s thoughts just before he walks the gnomonic lines of his route. In a shop, eating his peas, he considers all the missing pieces of his life: a job, a home, a warm fire, a good dinner, “some good simple-minded girl with a little of the ready” (58). The empty space in his gnomonic route comes only a few minutes after he’s recognized the empty space in his life, a sort of perambulatory confirmation of his preceding thoughts.

The story’s interpretations are also enhanced by the element of time. Twilight is approaching, the street lamps are shining, and the moon and its double halo are already visible when the story opens. The sun sets in Dublin in August around 8:15 at the beginning of the month and about 9:20 at the end. At one point when Lenehan and Corley are still together, toward the beginning of the story, Lenehan notes it’s “[t]wenty after” (53) and later, after they separate he wonders “how he could pass the hours till he met Corley again” at “[h]alf ten.” Thus it’s probably just after 7 or (more likely) 8 at the beginning of the story. Corley and Lenehan walk together, joking and bantering, from Rutland Square to the east side of Stephen’s Green, a distance of about  2 kilometers. According to the map, walking from Rutland Square to Stephen’s Green would take 28 minutes. During their walk together, Lenehan listens to a long narrative of Corley’s and “laugh[s] noiselessly for fully half a minute” (50); they discuss Corley’s girl; they smoke a cigarette, discuss the evening’s plan, talk more about Corley’s girl, hear a harp play as they walk, spy on the girl, and then separate. All of this happens with seeming fluidity, and the men seem comfortable enough in each other’s presence. However, the conversation becomes more stilted, more strained, when we realize that it has taken place over nearly half an hour.  Taking the time into consideration, the conversation shows signs of strain: a lughing reaction must take a full half a minute; a conversation topic dies and must be reignited several minutes later; the offer of a cigarette acts almost as a filler for the perhaps awkward silence. Once Corley breaks away from his companion to converse with his “slavey,” Lenehan wanders the city, covering nearly another six kilometers over the course of two to three more hours. Lenehan reunites with his friend after 10:30, maybe even 11.

Naas Road

Clos-up of Letts, Son & Co. London 1883 Map of Dublin showing "Road from Naas" along the blue tram route line. Map available online at http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/js95yj
Close-up of Letts, Son & Co. London 1883 Map of Dublin showing “Road from Naas” along the blue tram route line. Map available online at http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/js95yj

The Naas Road, what is referred to on at least two nineteenth-century maps of Dublin as the “Road from Naas,” is the route by which the race cars of “After the Race” enter the city: “The cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road” (42).

Running diagonally from southwest to northeast, the Naas Road is now just one section of the major N7 highway connecting Limerick and Dublin. Parts of the original road’s route, including the section the cars traveled along Inchicore Square, are no longer part of Naas Road proper but have been reassigned the R110 Road. The 1903 Gordon Bennet cup race, which the cars would have just competed in, was held in County Kildare, southwest of both Dublin and Naas.

Donnybrook

Donnybrook, or Domhnach Broc, is a district in the south part of Dublin neighboring Ballsbridge, Sandymount, and Merrion. It’s where Corley of “Two Gallants” claims to have taken his “slavey” one day:

“I put my arm round her and squeezed her a bit that night. Then next Sunday, man, I met her by appointment. We went out to Donnybrook and I brought her into a field there” (50-51).

It’s soon revealed that Corley intends to meet this girl again that evening. Once Corley parts with Lenehan, Lenehan follows his friend at a distance to get a look at her. He finally observes the two “climbing the stairs of the Donnybrook tram” (56). Apparently the field was a hit, and the pair are off to visit it again.

Donnybrook Fair 1859 by Erskine Nicol 1825-1904 from the Tate digitized collections. © Tate, London 2013
Donnybrook Fair 1859 by Erskine Nicol 1825-1904 from the Tate digitized collections. © Tate, London 2013

The hardly romantic “field” Corley takes the girl to is on par with the probable connotation of the district itself. The site of the historic Donnybrook Fair, established in 1205 and ended in 1855 due to its “irksome” tendency to turn its visitors into “intoxicated savages,” Donnybrook is also a slang term for “[a] scene of uproar and disorder; a riotous or uproarious meeting; a heated argument,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. That such a place is the rendezvous spot for Corley and his girl amplifies the already crude or indelicate nature of their relationship.

Additionally, and not surprisingly, the reference holds connotations to a song, “Humours of Donnybrook,” which Joyce could have found in the 1849 Croker-PopularSongs. Here are the lyrics:

 

To Donnybrook steer all you sons of Parnassus
Poor painters, poor poets, poor newsmen and knaves
To see what the fun is that all fun surpasses
The sorrows and sadness of green Erin's slaves
Oh Donnybrook Jewel! Full of mirth is your quiver
Where all flock from Dublin to gape and to stare
At two elegant bridges without e'er a river
So success to the humours of Donnybrook Fair


Oh you lads that are witty, from famed Dublin city
And you that in pastime take any delight
To Donnybrook fly, for the time's drawing nigh
When fat pigs are hunted and lean cobblers fight
When maidens so swift run for a new shift
Men muffled in sacks, for a shirt they race there
There jockeys well booted and horses sure-footed
All keep up the humours of Donnybrook Fair


The mason does come with his line and his plumb
The sawyer and carpenter, brothers in chips
There are carvers and guilders and all sorts of builders
With soldiers from barracks and sailors from ships
There confectioners, cooks and the printers of books
There stampers of linen and weavers repair
There widows and maids and all sorts of trades
Go join in the humours of Donnybrook Fair


There tinkers and nailers and beggars and tailors
And singers of ballads and girls of the sieve
With Barrack street rangers, the known ones and strangers
And many that no one can tell how they live
There horsemen and walkers and likewise fruit-hawkers
And swindlers the devil himself that would dare
With pipers and fiddlers and dandlers and diddlers
All met in the humours of Donnybrook Fair

'Tis there are dogs dancing and wild beasts a-prancing
With neat bits of painting, red, yellow and gold
Toss players and scramblers and showmen and gamblers
Pick-pockets in plenty, the young and the old
There are brewers and bakers and jolly shoemakers
With butchers and porters and men that cut hair
There are montebanks grinning, while others are sinning
To keep up the humours of Donnybrook Fair


Brisk lads and young lassies can fill up their glasses
With whiskey and send a full bumper around
Jig it off in a tent till their money's all spent
And spin like a top till they rest on the ground
Oh Donnybrook capers to sweet cat-gut scrapers
They bother the vapours and drive away care
And what is more glorious, there's naught more uproarious
Hurrah for the humours of Donnybrook Fair

 

 

North Richmond Street

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

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

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

Back Lane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wicklow Street

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

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

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

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

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

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