Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was born two hundred years ago today at 45 Lower Dominic Street in Dublin. He was author of at least fourteen novels, numerous short stories, poetry, and one play. He also wrote a great many articles for the city’s conservative press. Today, Le Fanu, whose family were originally Huguenot refugees and who counted Richard Brinsley Sheridan among his forebears, is mostly remembered for his gothic and horror fiction. His imagination was dark, almost to the point of disorder. Here he describes the victim of a fire:

The head and one arm and shoulder, as well as one knee, were thrust through the iron stanchions, and all was black and shrunk, the clothes burned entirely away, and the body roasted and shrivelled to a horrible tenuity; the lips dried up and drawn, so that the white teeth grinned and glittered in hideous mockery, and thus the whole form, arrested in the very attitude of frenzied and desperate exertion, showed more like the hideous blackened effigy of some grinning ape, than anything human.

Le Fanu, in this mode, might remind some readers of Stephen King. Certainly he could write sensational material very well, yet he never quite achieved his literary or commercial potential. His narratives seemed to turn in on themselves rather than advance towards the sort of orderly conclusions the Victorian reader had grown to expect. The indirection which marks his work ultimately derived from his ceaseless desire to imagine an Ireland in which Anglicans, like his own family, played a legitimate and honourable role. His elaborate narratives, which were frequently historical in setting, were ultimately allegorical and, at heart, tortured efforts to square the impossible circle of Ireland’s past. If Le Fanu had been content to “just write stories” he might well have been an Irish Wilkie Collins – though he might have been less interesting as a result.

The family moved from Dominic Street when Joseph was two. His father was an Anglican minister and was appointed chaplain at the Royal Hibernian Military School in the Phoenix Park. The park, with its eighteen hundred acres of rolling grassland and various imperial institutions, was one of the few locations in the country where one might gain the impression of a well-ordered and harmonious society under a benevolent crown. Le Fanu spent about eleven years there and it seems they were untroubled and carefree. As WJ McCormack recounts in his biography of the writer, the young Joseph sometimes amused himself drawing pictures. One featured balloonists speeding towards the earth, having fallen from their basket. The picture was accompanied by the caption: “See the effects of trying to go to heaven.” Perhaps he had heard of the Daedalus myth ‑ or perhaps it was an early sign of his conservative instincts.

In 1826 Le Fanu’s father, Thomas, having gained some remunerative clerical posts in rural Ireland moved the family to a country parish in Co Limerick. The contrast with the well-ordered world of the Phoenix Park could hardly have been greater. In Limerick, the harsh realities of Irish life were unavoidable: it was an area which at that time ‑ to use the term favoured by the authorities ‑ was “disturbed”. Beyond the modest walls of the glebe house the sullen Catholic masses were threatening. It was here that the young Le Fanu first encountered the Irish peasantry and their grievances. A part of him sympathised. He understood his relatively privileged status, and yet he couldn’t have felt very privileged since his family was hard-pressed financially. The main reason the Le Fanus were short of money, and obliged to borrow from relatives, was that the Catholic peasantry was increasingly reluctant to pay the tithes tax to the Anglican church.

Le Fanu spent his teenage years in this troubling environment, which shaped his imaginative world and his political principles. His view of the world came to be characterised by two contending impulses: a deep sympathy with the fate of the “old Irish” and a firm commitment to the political interests of his caste. When he moved to Dublin to study law he gravitated towards conservative politics and spent many evenings attending meetings of the Metropolitan Conservative Society in Dawson Street. The meetings were held in the building which now houses the Royal Irish Academy. Yet one of his first pieces of writing from around that time reveals a pronounced sympathy for the rebels of 1798.

But if you would ask me as I think it like,
If in the rebellion I carried a pike,
And fought for old Ireland from the first to the close,
And shed the heart’s blood of her bitterest foes,
I answer you “Yes” and I tell you again,
Though I stand here to perish, it’s my glory that then
In her cause I was willing my veins should run dry,
And that now for her sake I am ready to die.

It has been said that the character in the verse was based on a Co Limerick rebel named Kirby who was condemned to death for participating in the rebellion.

If Le Fanu had some popular sympathies he was also a virulent opponent of O’Connell and a staunch defender of the Protestant interest. He owned and contributed to The Warder and several other ultra-Protestant journals. But, it seems, he found no joy in this work and was driven more by wearisome duty than substantial emotional engagement. In the Gothic horror genre he found freedom from the oppressively factual, a freedom which allowed for literary exploration beyond the arid political rhetoric of the everyday. And in his historical fiction Le Fanu could probe emotionally satisfying might-have-beens. Yet in both forms he found it impossible to imagine the desideratum of an Ireland where his alienation evaporated and both Anglican and Irish co-mingled in harmony. Fiction, even gothic fiction, could only stray a certain distance from the actual.

An episode in The Cock and Anchor, an historical novel published in 1845, does offer the vision of an Irish unity but the unity discovered is not based on noble or generous impulses but rather on the basest of human instincts. The exhibition of a cock fight sees the coming together of all social classes but offers no hopeful augury for the future:

all these gross and glaring contrarieties reconciled and bound together in one hellish sympathy. All sate locked in breathless suspense, every countenance fixed in the hard lines of intense, excited anxiety and vigilance; all leaned forward to gaze upon the combat whose crisis was on the point of being determined … Every aperture in this living pile was occupied by some eager, haggard or ruffian face; and, in spite of all the pushing, and bustling, all were silent, as if the powers of voice and utterance were unknown among them.

28/8/2014

In an intriguing opinion series recently published over four weeks this summer in The Irish Times, Conor Gearty wrote: “Democracy is a product of a particular moment in each of our collective pasts, in Britain following the emergence of the labour and suffragette movements for example, and in Ireland after independence.”

I wonder if that is true. I always thought Irish democracy was the result of a long haul featuring not one but many crucial moments. In the early 1930s, when much of Europe was in thrall to authoritarianism and democracy was widely seen as morally corrupting, there was in Ireland a peaceful handover of power between forces which had fought a civil war a decade previously. This is a curious phenomenon that requires explanation. I can’t think of much in the 1920s that helps.

If the interest is in crucial moments, one of them occurred a full century before the 1920s. The gifted historian Fergus O’Ferrall describes a crucial Dublin election in the 1820s:

In the election in February 1823 to fill the vacancy Co Dublin became sharply divided between Sir Compton Domville, representing the “no popery” and Orange interest, and Colonel Henry White, son of the famously rich [and liberal] Luke White … O’Connell and others formed a committee to organise the Dublin freeholders behind White. O’Connell, using techniques for the first time which were to become synonymous with the Catholic struggle, went to “the towns of Rush and Skerries and harangued in the streets of each”. This public engagement with parliamentary politics led directly to the second, private, event which was to have such profound consequences for the future. During the election campaign a private dinner party took place on Saturday 8 February at Glencullen, in the Dublin mountains, the home of Thomas O’Mara, O’Connell’s close friend. Among the guests were O’Connell, Sheil and Lord Killeen, a son of the Earl of Fingall.

The topic of conversation was the state of Catholic politics. Views were exchanged on the “utter want of system and organisation” among Catholics … Sheil was now convinced that O’Connell’s leadership was necessary in a totally new democratic organisation. They both agreed to contact leading Catholics to lay plans for a new body which would fight for Emancipation and end “the total stagnation” which had made the political monopoly of Protestants and the abuses of the Ascendancy so secure. It was agreed that the comprehensive and democratic nature of the new initiative, which O’Connell had in mind, should not at the outset be made clear; if the attempt was to be successful … Quickly after the dinner party came the very encouraging result in the Co Dublin election. White narrowly defeated Domville … O’Connell … and his supporters savored this victory over the Orangemen; they mounted a procession to chair White from the hustings at Kilmainham into the city centre. This infuriated the staunch protestants in Trinity College, as O’Connell related to his wife: “I never saw such a crowd. I was in the first carriage next to White’s chair …We passed through the Liberty etc., stopped to give four cheers for the King at the Castle and so went on to College Green. The College lads attacked the people with stones etc. but they were soon put to the rout. I had a great view of part of the battle. In short, no popular triumph was ever half so great.”

Mass democratic politics developed in Ireland from that point and to date the political culture that resulted has proved a bulwark against those who feel they know better than the popular will.

19/08/2014

Correction: In an earlier version of this blog Fergus O’Ferrall was described as “The late and ‑ I think it is accurate to say ‑ brilliant historian Fergus O’ Ferrall”. Dr O’ Ferrall is indeed a brilliant historian of the O’Connell era but, as we are very happy to report,  is very much alive. We apologise for this serious error.

03/10/ 2014

Cruel Cruel, Margaret Stackpoole

Or was it Frances? There are different accounts out there. A pinch of salt ‑ medium to large ‑ is required when considering the many miseries and oppressions that, in his own telling, befell the poet James Clarence Mangan. If things were bad at home – the wretched Pater! ‑ conditions declined close to those of a galley slave when he was employed as an attorney’s scrivener in York Street. Or did they? Some of those who worked with him describe conditions which were not especially bad.

Despite the tall tales nobody seems to have a bad word to say about Mangan. Undoubtedly, this is to do with his troubled life and soul. Yeats, Joyce and many others admired this larger than life figure who sacrificed his health and life for his aesthetic and embodied the romantic idea of the artist. His life was indeed rough; he died at the age of forty-nine but the suspicion remains that he exaggerated its horrors.

One straw in the wind suggesting he may not have been exactly chained down in Hades is the reasonable social life enjoyed by the author of “Dark Rosaleen” in premises around D’Olier Street and Dame Street, mixing and drinking with contributors to various literary journals. He also seems to have been able, albeit in his somewhat dysfunctional manner, to attend to a matter of the heart.

The Stackpoole family lived on Mount Pleasant Square in the suburb of Ranelagh and it seems Mangan was on visiting terms. (Not bad going for a galley slave!) Indeed, it seems he took a particular shine to Margaret Stackpoole, a daughter of the house. According to Yeats, and by common assent, she was the prettiest of three daughters.

John Mitchel of 1848, to hell with O’Connell, Jail Journal and there’s nothing wrong with slavery fame, was quite pally with Mangan in his final years. Mangan had declared his support for Mitchel’s form of nationalism in 1848. Those politics did not appeal to Joyce – a latter day O’Connellite – and constituted his one criticism of Mangan.

In his account of Mangan’s life Mitchell seems surprised that the poet could have been on visiting terms at such a grand address and implies that he was out of his league. Of course Mitchel knew him in the later 1840s when Mangan was addicted to opium and wandered around Dublin with green tinted glasses, a massive cloak and large conical hat frequently attracting the attention of disrespectful urchins, much like those who followed Leopold Bloom when he left the Freeman office some sixty years later.

Nevertheless, given the poet’s meagre resources (according to Mangan’s own account his family lived in an unspeakable hovel on Chancery Lane), it is probably safe to conclude that he was always wholly outside the realm of rational consideration for one of Miss Stackpoole’s position in society. The Stackpooles were a landowning Norman family transplanted to Clare in 1651, where they continued to hold land. In the eighteenth century they converted to Protestantism and continued to prosper as major landowners in Clare. Some of the family moved to Dublin and they too were well got.

Mangan was probably accepted in Mount Pleasant Square – if it was Mount Pleasant Square (there are some anomalies) ‑ as an interesting young poet with a knowledge of foreign languages and literatures, that is to say for purposes of entertainment. Once he plucked up the courage and made his feelings known he presumably got the Prufrock treatment: “That is not what I meant at all.” or perhaps Margaret employed the time-honoured and ever serviceable “as a friend but no more” formula. Nothing so unusual there; rejecting and being rejected is, after all, an everyday occurrence.

What is interesting is the afterlife of the whole business, which involved a fair bit of what might be termed literary misogyny. The agreed interpretation is that Margaret was a right b***h, that she led on the poor poet, encouraging his hopes only to dash them in the cruellest manner. Mangan’s own self-focused view is reflected in the following lines from his autobiographical poem “The Nameless One”, written over a decade after the episode.

betrayed in friendship, befooled in love,
with spirit shipwrecked, and young hopes blasted,

This is pretty much in line with the self-pitying way he interpreted virtually everything that happened in his life. DJ O’Donoghue, in his life of Mangan, comments: “Mangan thenceforth looked upon the fair sex as essentially cruel and malicious and in one of his poems exclaims:

Man at most is made of clay ‑
Woman seems a block of granite!

In his account of Mangan’s life John Mitchel also takes an anti-Stackpoole line. This is probably the source of O’Donoghue’s opinion, as his other main source of information on Mangan, Father Meehan, does not appear aware of the Stackpoole incident. In Mitchel’s version ‑ which is his account of what an opium-addled Mangan told him some twenty years after the visits to Mountpleasant ‑ some classic objections to female ways are introduced. One assumes they are Mitchell’s own additions:

He (Mangan) was on terms of visiting in a house where were three sisters; one of them was beautiful, spirituelle, and a coquette. The old story was here once more re-enacted in due order. Paradise opened before him; the imaginative and passionate soul of a devoted boy bended in homage before an enchantress. She received it, was pleased with it, and even encouraged and stimulated it, by various arts know to that class of persons, until she was fully and proudly conscious of her absolute power over one other gifted and noble nature – until she knew that she was the centre of the whole orbit of his being, and the light of his life; then, with a cold surprise, as wondering that he could be guilty of such a foolish presumption, she exercised her undoubted prerogative, and whistled him down the wind.

In the American poet Loise Imogen Guiney’s account in 1892 there is no trace of gender solidarity but quite a bit of Michel’s influence:

His first love was given to a fair girl much “above him,” according to our strange surveys. She encouraged his shy approaches; and he was tremblingly, perilously happy. For the pleasantest period of his life he was in frequent social contact with interesting people of station and breeding, with those who made for him his fitting environment. But at the moment when he feared nothing he was taken like a bird in the fowler’s net, and cast scornfully away. Stunned and broken, he crept back as best he could to solitude.

Yeats, who also took an interest, seemed to think that he had made great discoveries regarding the poet’s love. In his account, Mitchel’s influence appears once more:

This love affair is the first of my new facts. Mangan met – between his twentieth and twenty-fifth year apparently – a Miss Stackpoole, one of three sisters, who lived in Mount Pleasant Square. She was a fascinating coquette, who encouraged him, amused herself with his devotion, and then “whistled him down the wind” … She was a handsome girl, with a tint of red in her hair, a very fashionable colour in our day, whatever it was then.

Of course Yeats was no stranger to the torments of unrequited love. And yet, while the resulting verse can be impressive, a lingering question remains: What part of “she’s just not that into you” do these intense poets find so hard to grasp.
16/06/2014

Man, companioned by care, has incessantly trod
His dark way to the grave down this valley of tears.
– James Clarence Mangan

In early nineteenth century Dublin getting by was a considerable problem for most people. Indeed huge numbers did not get by at all but lived and died in abject poverty. For those born into what are now called the coping classes the stability of the home environment could be a crucial factor in avoiding the pecuniary abyss that gaped all around them. Two of the city’s great writers from that era, James Clarence Mangan and Thomas Moore, lived in this world where, without money, one could fall and fall.

Both were the sons of grocers from the city centre. One became an intimate of the Whig aristocracy and a bosom companion of Lord Byron; the other, though given to a feisty assertion of individuality – he sported a green cloak, blue glasses and a blonde wig ‑ took to the drink (and the opium) and, weakened from malnutrition and years of poverty, died in misery from cholera in 1849. If Moore was assisted by a stable family background and an especially earnest and dedicated mother, these were advantages which his fellow Dubliner did not enjoy.

James Clarence Mangan was born in 1803 on Dublin’s Fishamble Street, an ancient medieval thoroughfare that winds up from the river and which for many centuries was the site of numerous fish stalls. A certain Molly Malone is said by some ‑ and without a shred of evidence ‑ to have lived there. By the early eighteenth century it seems, the street was no longer devoted to the fish trade and had become rather posh. The general post office was located there before it moved to what is now O’Connell Street. The printer of Swift’s Drapier’s Letters, John Harding, had his office on the street, Henry Grattan was born there and the Fishamble Street Music Hall hosted the first performance of Handel’s Messiah. The street also once boasted another popular theatre, which asserted its high standards by declining to admit men or women without shoes or stockings.

Like many streets which were fashionable enough in the eighteenth century Fishamble Street declined slowly thereafter. One of the reasons was the arrival in the city of large numbers of the rural poor. The house in which Mangan was born had once been the residence the Ussher family, one of whose members, James Ussher, founded the library of Trinity College. By the late eighteenth century the building had become a grocer’s shop. The owner, a Miss Catherine Smith, had inherited it from her aunt. Catherine did not fare well in the marriage lottery, marrying one James Mangan, a Limerick schoolteacher. According to some reports Mangan was a man of education and refinement, which may have assisted in his courtship of Miss Smith, whose grocery shop offered the means to a comfortable income. All that had to be done was run the shop. What could possibly go wrong? A great deal, it seems: Mangan père went broke a full eight times. Refinement of itself may not always help in balancing the shillings and the pence or providing the steadiness the successful grocer surely needs. Although Mangan referred to him as “My own excellent though unfortunate father”, he was also critical of him and blamed him for the family’s problems. Referring to the successful Thomas Moore he wrote:

I share with an illustrious townsman of my own, the honour or the disreputability, as it may be considered, of having been born the son of a grocer. My father, however, unlike his, never exhibited the qualities of guardian towards his children. His temper was not merely quick and irascible, but it also embodied much of that calm, concentrated spirit of Milesian fierceness, a picture of which I have endeavoured to paint in my Italian story of “Gaspara Bandollo”. His nature was truly noble; to quote a phrase of my friend O’Donovan (in the Annals of the Four Masters), he never knew what it was to refuse the countenance of living man; but in neglecting his own interests – and not the most selfish misanthrope could accuse him of attending closely to those – he unfortunately forgot the injuries that he inflicted upon the interests of others. He was of an ardent and forward-bounding disposition, and though deeply religious by nature, “he hated the restraints of social life, and seemed to think that all feelings with regard to family connections and the obligations imposed by them were totally beneath his notice. Me, my two brothers, and my sister, he treated habitually as a huntsman would treat refractory hounds; it was his boast, uttered in pure glee of heart, “That we would run into a mousehouse” to shun him. While my mother lived he made her miserable; he led my only sister such a life that she was obliged to leave our house; he kept up a succession of continued hostilities with my brothers; and, if he spared me more than others, it was, perhaps, because I displayed a greater contempt of life and everything connected with it than he thought was shown by the rest of the family … May God assoil his great and eternal soul, and grant him eternal peace and forgiveness. But I have an inward feeling, that to him I owe all my misfortunes.

One gets a fairly clear idea of Mangan senior’s character from this: a disastrous father and businessman. In his improvidence he recalls Joyce senior and it is perhaps no coincidence that Mangan was one of the few Irish writers preceding Joyce of whom the latter spoke of positively. There were many similarities in their family situations and it is possible that Joyce saw much in Mangan which mirrored his own experience. They both behaved in public with a certain grandeur. Mangan said of his father that his

grand worldly fault was improvidence. To everyone who applied to him for money he uniformly gave double or treble the sum requested of him. He parted with his money, he gave away the best part of his worldly property, and in the end he even suffered his own judgment and discretion to become the spoil of strangers. In plainer words, he permitted cold-blooded and crafty men to persuade him that he was wasting his energies by following the grocery business, and that by recommencing life as a vintner he would soon be able not only to retrieve all his losses but realise an ample fortune. And thus it happened, reader, that I, James Clarence Mangan, came into the world surrounded, if I may so express myself, by an atmosphere of curses and intemperance, of cruelty, infidelity, and blasphemy, and of both secret and open hatred towards the moral government of God.

Meanwhile, up on Aungier Street, Mr and Mrs Moore were working all the hours to pay for young Tom’s elocution lessons.
19/05/2014

August 2014 sees the bicentenary of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s birth in Dublin’s Dominick Street. Le Fanu was the son of a clergyman of the Church Of Ireland, the family having originally been Huguenot refugees. As a youth in Limerick and as a student at Trinity, Le Fanu was to become aware of the peculiar position of his caste in Ireland, a position he found impossible to reconcile politically but which he addressed imaginatively in his fiction. His boyhood days, however, were sheltered from the poisonous realities of early nineteenth century Ireland. His father, Thomas Le Fanu, was rector of the military school in the Phoenix Park and as the extract below from WJ Mc Cormack’s biography of Le Fanu shows, the park offered to the young Le Fanu a perfect idyll of artificial calm.

The Le Fanus stayed eleven years at the Military School, during which Joseph passed through an impressionable childhood. In Seventy Years of Irish Life, William provides examples of his brother’s early genius … the boy’s life was regulated by their father’s clerical duties, and by the military tone of a social world governed by the comings and goings of the highest dignitaries in the land. The nearest parish church was in Chapelizod, and the quaint little village between a weir and a bridge on the Liffey soberly impressed young Le Fanu with its antiquity.
An exception to the routine occurred in 1821. George IV had come to the throne in the previous year amid general celebrations, and he was anxious to consolidate his popularity with a tour of his Irish kingdom. Thomas and Emma were included among the guests at a levee and a drawing-room; as part of the Lord Lieutenant’s retinue, the chaplain to the School was presented to His Majesty. The children watched the king’s procession into Dublin from their grandfather’s house in Eccles street. The Phoenix Park with its official residences and vast open spaces was the ideal arena for military displays, and while the king presided Joseph and William Le Fanu watched a grand review of infantry regiments marching past in their white knee-breeches and long black gaiters … Display, symbol, gesture dominated the military life of Dublin in the years between 1814 and 1826; the disturbed countryside was almost as remote as Waterloo. Of course, the Chief Secretary and his political staff were constantly in touch with developments across the country but that was a side to their activity hidden from a young boy. To him the officials were essentially ceremonial; their duties were public demonstrations of a political orthodoxy. The Phoenix Park, to an imaginative child, was an open-air cathedral, the liturgy political as well as religious, for the two can never be separated in nineteenth century Ireland. Doubtless his father knew all about the implications of city life ‑ the shopkeepers and their bills, relations and their little problems. The boy only saw the splendid integrity of the Phoenix Park, its utter difference to the city and the countryside alike. It was an artificial landscape populated by symbolic figures.

6/05/2014

Terry Montague writes: On a very wet day in the late 1950s I got on a number 20 bus in Middle Abbey Street to go to Donnycarney. I had collected, from Eason wholesale further up Middle Abbey Street, stock for my shop, which had opened a year earlier and was doing quite well, despite my youth and Northern accent.

Somewhat reluctantly, and because of the parcels, I didn’t go upstairs but sat downstairs with two packages on my knees. There was an elderly woman next to me and she immediately offered to take the smaller parcel. I let her take it and said “It’s an awful day.”

Responding to my accent, she said “You’re from the North? I told her I was from Tyrone but she wanted to know exactly where so I told her: “A wee place called Carrickmore.”

She surprised me by saying she’d been there twice in Easter Week 1916. I then remembered a story I’d heard years previously from my father and said: “So you are Nora Connolly, James Connolly’s daughter.” She said she was and that she was now Nora O’Brien, living in Marino.

Years later I put the details together. Dr Pat McCartan was one of the founders of the Dungannon Club, which was set up at the behest of Joe McGarrity, his cousin, who ran the Irish movement in Philadelphia. This was one of the first of the Irish Volunteer movements to counteract the Ulster Volunteers. He was an important member of the amalgam of individuals and organisations that brought the armed rebellion into being and it was he who set up the Irish Volunteers in Carrickmore.

In Holy Week 1916 he went for his orders to Dublin. There he met Pearse and Connolly. Their orders were that the Belfast Volunteers and the Volunteers of Carrickmore and Coalisland were to assemble quietly around Cookstown and Coalisland and then march across country to join up with the Volunteers of Mayo.

McCartan was aghast. It was a suicide mission. From south of Clones up to Strabane was a very active area for the Ulster Volunteers. The British army was based in Omagh and Enniskillen. They would not have gone three miles from Carrickmore before shooting started. They’d have been totally outnumbered and surrounded.

Both Denis McCullough, who was in the IRB and leader of the Belfast section of the Volunteers, and McCartan agreed the orders were foolish and so they refused to march west to Mayo. After hanging out around east Tyrone for a few days the Belfast Volunteers, quietly and in small numbers, took the train from Cookstown and went back to Belfast.

Nora Connolly O’Brien told me that she cycled to get the train at Dundalk and from there to Cookstown and then to Carrickmore to urge the Volunteers to act at once ‑ without avail. She went back to Dublin and was sent back to Tyrone again. But neither McCartan nor McCullough would allow their men to be slaughtered in Co Tyrone.

McCartan stood for the presidency against Sean T O’Kelly in1945. His daughter married Ronnie Drew. McCullough too was in the music business. His family bought Piggotts to form McCullough Piggotts.
22/04/2014

A website (www.manonbridge.ie – a somewhat unreliable link; try it yourself, good luck) related to a documentary film currently in production and a Guardian website article and photographic feature on the work of the late Arthur Fields (born Abraham Feldman in 1901), who took snaps of passersby on Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge for fifty years, from the 1930s to the 1980s, have awakened a memory for me ‑ as I am sure the name, or as likely a half-recollection of the bridge photographer himself, does for very many Irish people. Fields’s commercial technique, it appears, was to pretend to have taken a photograph of any half-likely prospect and then, if they showed a flicker of interest, to take the real photograph a moment later. If you seemed pleased to have had your snap taken then Arthur would hand you a ticket and you could redeem your photograph the next day in a small office/studio just off O’Connell Street, which was run by Mrs Fields. If anyone under sixty is reading this I should perhaps explain that with the technology then available there were costs attached to taking a photograph merely on spec, so film tended not to be wasted. Also, a camera, at least during the earlier part of Fields’s career, was a luxury item which might appear only on formal and ceremonial occasions or, if you were the kind of family who could afford to take holidays, perhaps once or twice during a summer at the seaside.

Fields captured couples and groups, both visitors and Dubliners, from 1930s swells to 1950s teddyboys, 60s mods and hippies and 70s and 80s punks, often with the O’Connell monument – and earlier, the Pillar – visible in the background. In all it seems he took more than 180,000 photographs, so it is fairly likely that he took one of someone you knew. I am almost certain that he took one of me. I do not have it to hand but I have a memory of having seen it.

I can’t vouch for what percentage of Fields’s paid-for shots were of out-of-towners, but I would guess it was quite high. Dubs, we know, are sophisticated creatures, while culchies are as likely as not to walk straight into the first jackeen ruse they encounter. Citizens of the capital also tend for the most part to be just going about their business and will perhaps not be hugely interested in having their photographs taken, unless of course there is something they need to prove to a girlfriend (“Mean? Me?”). Folk from Castleisland or Abbeyfeale or Mooncoin on the other hand could be just up for the match and might wish to have this famous football or hurling victory ‑ and their part in it ‑ recorded for posterity.

It was perhaps in 1968 that my friends Seamus and Augusta and I were caught by Arthur on the bridge. Two Dohertys and an O’Doherty and none of us related to each other ‑ it should not be necessary to ask where we were from.

One of the great advantages of occasionally escaping from the home place is that one can do things that might, were they to get out in the local community, lead to talk. It is pleasant, when one is barely seventeen, to have vodka and limes (genuine synthetic cordial, not the poncey real fruit they give you nowadays) served to one’s table on a quiet afternoon in a carpeted upstairs lounge just across from Trinity College (today it is Doyle’s – and no longer carpeted; then it was the College Mooney). The very engaging barman, I am almost certain, was the same one whom William Trevor described in a memoir of Dublin in the 1950s, a Dev lookalike (according to Trevor, that is – he had a few more miles on the clock when I came across him) whose stock-in-trade was to compulsively parrot the advertising slogans of Radio Éireann’s sponsored music shows (“Bird’s custard, Bird’s Angel Delight”). What I now recall, though I think it passed me by at the time, is that he seemed to exhibit a greater interest in myself and Seamus than in the very attractive Augusta, who was in fact the only one of the three of us legally entitled to be served alcohol.

Another thing that you can do in a place that is not your own is to challenge public morals – though you had better choose your place well. I was walking, during the summer of 1967 I think, down the main street of Buncrana, Co Donegal with my very fetching Culmore Road neighbour Maeve when we were approached by a stern Garda sergeant who told us (well, her) that we must leave town immediately as the shorts she was wearing could lead to a traffic accident or even cause respectable married men to walk out on their wives and children. Sheepishly, we complied. That was Donegal. I cannot be absolutely sure of this but my recollection of having briefly seen Arthur Fields’s photograph perhaps a decade ago is that of the three young Derry people squinting into the sun on O’Connell Bridge on a summer’s day in 1968 one was wearing short shorts. And no one said boo to her. It is little wonder that young people migrate in such numbers to large cities.

http://bit.ly/1dZ3GXB

31/03/2014

The Dublin Penny Journal, The Irish Penny Magazine and similar Dublin publications from the 1830s and 1840s were all interesting journals in their way but tended to suffer from a surfeit of earnestness. They were preoccupied with spreading knowledge, which they claimed would be of great benefit to the poor. The objective was to improve the masses by turning them into enthusiasts for information. All claimed to be non-political, but that claim is questionable, unless one believes that a plan to transform the culture of the poor by rendering them into single-minded rationalists is non-political.

As one might expect, not all from the lower orders felt their lives should be spent discussing such edifying matters as the geology of Dublin and its suburbs. When we turn to Paddy Kelly’s Budget we encounter the more credible, if less high-minded, concerns of the population, that is to say gossip and relations between the sexes.

The Budget, which was popular, humorous and irreverent in style, was quite unconcerned with the larger political questions of the day, unless its opposition to the temperance movement can be classed as a political position. In addition to a range of comic material it printed various bits of gossip and information it picked up and which give some flavour of its interests:

Cupid wishes to know is it to Fleming the butter man of Moore Street that Miss Mary Lawlor of Henry St is to be married on St Valentine’s Day?
What is it to us if Doyle of Stoneybatter puts up every night the shutters of his mother’s public house? An account of his nightly adventures with Miss Devine in our next.
Miss Farrell of Sackville Street, would wish to know if Mr McGill of the same street will meet her punctually at Mrs Duffy’s Phibsborough on Sunday next, as she has something to communicate to him concerning their future etceteras
Mick Tancred requests that Richard Gratton of Mary’s Lane will remain at home and cease annoying the widow O’Gara.
It was really too bad in Old Squally Murphy of Watling St to turn out the poor missus and beat up the children.
Your cursing and swearing old Squally I’m told
puts the neighbours in mind of Hell’s Monarch the old
chap that’s waiting upon you below.
So repent you old Cove or you surely must go.

24/03/2014

Francis “Fanny” Taylor, an English convert to Catholicism and a regular visitor to Dublin in the 1860s, had some slight criticisms of Dublin institutions which cared for blind children and those who were deaf mutes, but on balance found much to praise.

On the opposite side of Dublin to Portobello, near the beautiful cemetery of Glasnevin, is the Blind Asylum for boys and men. The door was opened to us by a Brother in the Carmelite dress, but both dress and Brother were so dirty we thought he had come to the door by mistake. He showed us into a small parlour, where we found a poor little blind boy, whom his father had brought, waiting in hopes of admission.
Presently in came the superior, but alas! there was little improvement in his appearance from that of the porter. He was, however, most pleasant and good natured in his manner, and quite willing we should see the institution. We went first into the shop where the articles made by the blind are arranged. Few are sold on the premises, for the asylum is quite out of Dublin, and I should imagine has few visitors. They are bought, however, by shops, and thus employment is afforded to the boys. There was a great array of brushes, mats, and baskets of all kinds, and they looked very well made. Two workmen are employed in the institution to teach the blind and superintend their work. We were then shown into a large, desolate-looking sort of barn, absolutely bare of furniture, except that at the extreme end was a piano. A gentleman was seated at it, and a few of the blind boys were standing round him taking a music lesson. We went to the basket department where we found other blind boys making coarse baskets and hampers, and this our guide told us was all that was to be seen.
The whole place was very dirty and disorderly, the blind inmates were dirty and untidy, and had an uncared-for look, as if in the hands of those who did not understand their management. We noticed with pain the contrast between the blind boys and girls; the latter so thoroughly trained to exert their faculties and do all they can to help themselves. They walk about with an air of freedom and confidence, feeling sure they will be guarded from all danger. The blind boys, even those who had been ten years in the house, stumbled here and there, literally groping their way, and showing very plainly that their capabilities had never been drawn out, or their education as blind persons attended to. And of course it is not every-one or every religious order that is suited to this important work. The teachers must themselves not only learn but possess qualities suited to the task. No doubt the Carmelite brothers have the kindest and best intentions towards their afflicted charges, and we heard from good authority that the moral training of the institution is excellent, but they do not give a visitor the impression of being suited for the difficult and arduous task entrusted to them. We came away wondering that in the diocese of Dublin such an asylum was suffered to exist without reform.
Not very far from Glasnevin, on the Cabra Road, is an institution which forms a striking contrast to the one we have just mentioned. It is the Home for Deaf and Dumb Boys under the charge of the Christian Brothers. The building is a large and handsome one, standing on rising ground, with a large open space surrounding it. Fortunately we arrived there just before school broke up, and found the large schoolrooms filled with silent and attentive scholars. The Brother accompanying us questioned the different classes as we passed along. The question was written on the black board with chalk, and the boys answered on their slates with remarkable celerity. It was curious to see how they watched their teacher’s face, and how one word or a sign was sufficient for them; the rest was read from the countenance of the Brother. From the schoolrooms we passed into the workshops, where different trades are taught the boys, each superintended by a skilled workman. We visited the tailor’s department, and then the shoemaker’s, and in these a certain number of boys learn to make their own clothes and shoes. From thence we passed to the bakery, where some of the boys help to make the bread of the establishment; and, lastly, we visited the printing office, where the foreman showed us specimens of very fair printing indeed done by the deaf-mutes. There is always plenty of employment for them in this line, as the Christian Brothers, who are a numerous body in Ireland, publish their own school books and have many of them printed here. By the time we had seen the shops the boys had finished school, and rushed out into the playground where they ran about and occasionally made an uncouth noise. They never, however, said the Brother, play with the joyousness of other boys. They are cheerful and happy, but have a gravity beyond their years. The Brother showed us the large garden, well-planted with flowers and vegetables. Here a few at a time can always be trusted; they seem to have no turn for running over the beds or doing any mischief. Few have any taste for gardening, but they have a great belief in the efficacy of fresh air, and when they complain of some slight illness like to be allowed a walk in the garden. There they will be seen pacing up and down the gravel paths like grave old men, and after a little while they return to school “quite well”. The trades which the boys are taught are made quite a secondary object as compared with the school work. They were, in fact, added on after the asylum had been for some time in the hands of the Brothers. For these religious were not content with looking after and teaching the boys, they studied them, and they found it would be an excellent thing to create some employment which should fill up spare hours and interest them, besides giving them assistance towards earning their bread when they leave. Playtime is not to them the entire relaxation it is to other boys, and the most common temptation to deaf-mutes would be to plot and conspire among themselves if left too much to their unoccupied thoughts. For the freemasonry of a deaf-mute is unlimited. The most vigilant teacher, well trained in the language of the deaf and dumb, can never be a match for boys who can carry on their conversations in silence and with the utmost celerity. The trades were introduced, and a most excellent effect has resulted from them. The boys are occupied, interested, happy, and contented, and try to prepare themselves for earning their own bread. “But school work is by far the most important for them,” insisted and repeated the Brother; “to be able to communicate with their fellow-creatures is the main point for them.” Reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, and in some cases a little drawing, are generally the whole of their attainments; and a course of ten years is usually required before this can be fully acquired. It s difficult for those not acquainted with deaf-mutes to understand the immense labour required to teach boys for whom sound has no meaning.

After passing through the dormitories, which are large, lofty and airy, we entered a small room called the study, where the elder and more advanced boys come to read in the evenings. I was surprised on taking up the books to see in what simple language they were written; and then we discovered that when the deaf-mute has learnt to read, the world of literature is by no means open to him. A new word to him conveys no meaning. He can read “banner”, for instance, as well as we can; but till someone shows him by signs what it is he is none the wiser, and therefore his progress through the world of words is necessarily slow. I asked if the boys were inclined to be religious, and was answered in the affirmative. They soon acquire a settled conviction that there is not much chance of happiness for them in this world; that most of its enjoyments are shut out from them, and that they had better try and secure the promises of the world to come. They are always eager to approach the sacraments; have a very lively faith in the unseen world, and often talk of heaven as the place where they shall for the first time “speak and sing”. Their fault is generally violent temper, which vents itself oftener in spite and revenge, not being able to express itself in outspoken fury. The care of deaf-mutes is a far more arduous and depressing one than that of the blind; and we felt a deep admiration when we saw these excellent Brothers, many of them young, clever and superior men, devoting themselves to this laborious undertaking for the sole motive of the love of God.
The blind are after all beings like ourselves, helpless by a certain deprivation, and cut off from many of the pleasures of life, but with their other senses sharpened to an extraordinary degree, often proficients in certain arts, and able to enter into and understand all that passes around them—affectionate relations, true and faithful friends. The deaf-mutes are a race apart, a people within a people, cut off from their fellow-creatures by a mysterious and impassable barrier. It is extraordinary to recollect how many centuries were suffered to pass away before any attempt was made to alleviate the condition of a deaf-mute. They were “separated from both God and man by a law more immutable than that which divided the leper from his nation”. Far too little known is the noble man who though he “worked no miracle, yet taught the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak”. M Sicard, inventor of the language for the deaf and dumb, was born in 1742 and died in 1822. M Carton, from whom we quote the above words, remarks on the “infinite toil and trouble” with which the deaf-mute must be taught. He says, “it is the labour of a life, one-half at least of which must be spent in learning how to give what the other half is devoted to imparting”. The grave necessity for a deaf and dumb asylum may easily be perceived when we learn that the census of 1863 gives 5,653 as the number of deaf-mutes in Ireland. The Cabra Asylum receives two classes of inmates: first, the children of the poor; and, secondly, the children of those who can afford to pay a small pension for their support. Little difference is, however, made between the two classes; the second have a separate dormitory, a few extra comforts, and do not work at the trades; in all other respects they are on the same footing as their poor companions. Their common misfortune has levelled almost every distinction of rank. For the support of the poor boys, the Brothers are quite dependent on alms; and as this is the only Catholic institution in the three kingdoms, it ought to be better supported than it is, and either enlarged or similar ones set on foot at other places.
There was perfect cleanliness and order in all parts of the establishment, and a large allowance of fresh air. We took leave of the kind and courteous Brother and left the “Home for Deaf-mutes”, heartily wishing that the blind boys could enjoy the privilege of being under the care of the excellent and intelligent Christian Brothers. Their superior capability for the work over a single house of Carmelite Friars is obvious. Many hundreds of them are banded together under one superior-general, who can, of course, choose the subjects most suited for each particular work; added to this, every Brother is specially trained for the work of educating the poor, and taught to study their characters and to raise their tone. If their attention were once drawn to the care of the blind, no doubt we should soon have an asylum for boys equally good as that for girls.
Upon the Glasnevin Road stands another large and handsome building under the charge of these same Brothers. It is an orphanage for boys, principally supported by the Association of the Brothers of St Vincent de Paul. It seemed to us to be in excellent order and well managed, and, no doubt, is of great use in providing a refuge for homeless and orphan boys.
About half a mile farther out of Dublin than the Home for the Deaf and Dumb Boys, we find a similar institution for girls, under the care of the Sisters of St Dominic; they have also a school for young ladies. The building is not nearly so good a one as that for the boys, but at the same time it is well adapted for its purpose. The course of instruction for the deaf-mute girls is the same as for the boys. Needlework, of course, is added in this school. After having been a few moments in a deaf-mute school, the silence becomes oppressive. What a hum and murmur and stir of life would be heard among the children of any other school! but here these young creatures stand silently in their places, while their speaking eyes follow us about with an eager questioning glance, as if we could bring them news from the world from which they are for ever shut out. The communication of the deaf-mutes with each other and their teachers is a mixture of talking on the fingers and making signs. Their prayers are entirely in the latter. We asked the Sister in charge to let the children say a prayer before us, and accordingly they said, or rather acted, the Paternoster and Ave Maria. We were much struck by the extreme reverence of their manner and the depth of meaning in their gestures. “The Lord is with thee,” every head was bowed low upon the breast, a mute confession that the Highest had come down to the lowly, the Creator to the creature. The information the Sister (a fair, bright-looking girl of nineteen) gave us about the children tallied with that of the Christian Brothers ; the same faults, difficulties, and virtues characterise each sex. The Sister told us that when she first was put in charge over the children she could not imagine why the priest who came to hear the children’s confessions always sent for and consumed a quantity of lucifer matches. At last she asked the children why he wanted them. “Why, Sister, he wants to burn our sins,” was the instant reply; and then she found that all the children who could write preferred making their confessions in writing instead of using their peculiar language. A young deaf-and-dumb postulant was teaching in the school. The Sisters trust she will persevere, and that others among the deaf-mutes may have a similar vocation.
In my walks in the Glasnevin direction I often turned into the cemetery and wandered about its numerous alleys. A more beautiful cemetery I do not think could be found, thickly planted with trees and shrubs, the paths and graves most beautifully kept; many of the monuments are graceful and in good taste, and there are few of the hideous erections which disfigure the London cemeteries. Within the cemetery rises a “round tower”, but not “of other days”, for it is a modern erection and a memorial to Daniel O’Connell. Near it is the grave of “the Liberator”, a vault with an iron gate, to which you descend by steps, and through which the coffin is plainly to be seen. Offerings of flowers éternelles, and laurel wreaths, freshly gathered, were lying around. And no wonder. Surely there are faithful souls enough to keep tokens ever fresh and green before the grave of him whose great heart beat only for Ireland, without thought of self; who has lain down to rest worn out by the long conflict for his loved country, but victorious, even in his death, and leaving behind him an immortal name.

From: Irish Homes and Irish Hearts, Francis Taylor, 1867. Reprinted by UCD press 2013