Pubs

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The profusion of public houses, or "licensed premises" for drinking, in Dublin was (and is) by no means atypical for Ireland. In Have Ye No Homes to Go to?: The History of the Irish Pub (Collins Books, 2016), Kevin Martin quotes from a speech that temperance leader William Lawson delivered to the Irish Temperance Society in 1902. Lawson noted that, in 1845, the country had 15,000 public-house licenses for a population of 8 million, but in 1902 there were 19,000 licenses for only 4 million people. Anticipating Bloom's remark about Dublin, Lawson quoted someone from Tralee as having told him, "If a man was blindfolded and put standing in the centre of the street, and spun around a couple of times and started off in no particular direction, he could not go twenty yards without striking a public house." 

Even a novel as encyclopedic as Ulysses can hardly do justice to such a profusion of watering holes, but it makes a noble effort. The number of pubs featured or mentioned in the novel, not counting hotels and restaurants that served alcohol and the many "wine and spirit" or "spirit grocers" shops that may or may not have had a bar in the back, is huge. This list, organized by first appearance and with numbers referring to chapters in which the pubs are mentioned, is doubtless incomplete:

Other works by Joyce feature some of these houses, as well as others not mentioned in Ulysses. Farrington's pub crawl in "Counterparts," for instance, takes him from Davy Byrne's to the Scotch House, and thence to "Mulligan's of Poolbeg Street," a pub which is still in business and proudly touting its Joyce connection. By one reading of Finnegans Wake, everything in the book takes place in the Mullingar House in Chapelizod, where John Stanislaus Joyce drank away most of the money he earned for three years as secretary to a distilling company. HCE, according to the narrative, "owns the bulgiest bung-barrel that ever was tip-tapped in the privace of the Mullingar Inn."

Many of the chapters in Ulysses show men (and only men) either gathering in such establishments, or planning to do so, or recollecting recent visits. Mulligan plans to meet Stephen at the Ship, but Stephen instead drinks with his gang of pressmen at Mooney's. Bloom imagines that the Dignam mourners will stop for drinks after the funeral at Dunphy's, as the Citizen and his cronies do during the afternoon at Barney Kiernan's, and as Stephen and his medical friends do late at night in Burke's. Bloom takes his lunch with a glass of wine at Davy Byrne's, and Tom Kernan downs a couple of glasses of gin at Mr. Crimmins'. Other drinking establishments that figure in the day's events—the Ormond Hotel bar in Sirens, the doctors' commons in the National Maternity Hospital in Oxen of the Sun—are not technically pubs but feel like it, given the alcohol they provide and the boisterous camaraderie they foster. In Circe Stephen, in the person of Philip Sober, tallies up his day's drinking: "Mooney's en ville, Mooney's sur mer, the Moira, Larchet's, Holles street hospital, Burke's." (Larchet's Hotel and Restaurant at 11 College Green was very near the Moira House. Stephen has evidently stumbled from one into the other.)

Joyce enjoyed pubs as much as his father did, and the consoling presence of these comfortable establishments in every corner of the city radiates through the pages of Ulysses. But the novel also glances, again and again, at the social costs of a culture of omnipresent alcoholic availability. The encouragement of excessive consumption by men "treating" each other to successive rounds of drinks, the unusually high rate of alcoholism, the occasional outbursts of violence, the interruption of work and ruination of careers, the impoverishment of families, the estrangement of men and women, the incapacitations and premature deaths: all of these effects are documented in the novel, most of them repeatedly. By choosing a protagonist who appreciates the effects of alcoholic inebriation but never indulges it to excess, Joyce envisioned a path of moderation that he had scant success practicing in his own life.