Westland Row
Westland
Row
In Brief
Nearly all of Lotus Eaters takes place on or within one block of "Westland row," a street that runs along the eastern edge of the campus of Trinity College. In 1904 it was an important thoroughfare, featuring one of the city's four major train stations, a beautiful Catholic church, an elegant small hotel, and a post office. (The hotel and the post office are gone now, but the train station and the church remain.) In the second paragraph Bloom looks in the window of a tea company not far from the street's north end. Shortly after, he visits the post office and the church. Near the chapter's conclusion he enters a pharmacy at the south end of the street to buy some soap and skin lotion.
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The "Belfast and Oriental Tea Company" was located at 6 Westland Row in the shadow of the Loopline Bridge overpass which carried trains between the station and another major station on Amiens Street. Bloom contemplates the "leadpapered packets" in the shop's window, thinks of buying some tea from Tom Kernan (who works for the rival
The narrative records that, after breaking off his reverie,
"He turned away and sauntered across the road," i.e., from the
west side to the east. After entering the post office on the
east side and coming out with a letter, he turns right, stops
to talk to M'Coy while watching a couple leave the hotel
across the street, walks up to the northern end of Westland
Row at Great Brunswick Street (today called Pearse Street), turns right again on Great
Brunswick, turns right yet again on South Cumberland Street,
turns right a fourth time to enter St. Andrew's church
through the back door, observes a service being conducted,
exits the church through the front door, and turns left,
walking "southward along Westland row" toward the pharmacy.
The train station does not figure in the action of Lotus
Eaters, but Joyce returns to it later in the novel as
Buck Mulligan and Haines make plans to return to the Sandycove tower. The
Westland Row station served all the trains running to and from
points southeast of Dublin, including Counties Wicklow and
Wexford. (Today DART trains connect it to various points on
the southeastern suburban coast, reaching Sandymount, Dun Laoghaire, Sandycove,
Dalkey, and Bray.) In Oxen of the Sun
a parodically distorted Haines briefly appears in the
maternity hospital and, before disappearing, says to Mulligan,
"Meet me at Westland Row station at ten past eleven."
In the following two chapters Bloom thinks several
times about confusing events that occurred at this station
after leaving the hospital and Burke's pub.
Early in Circe he recalls jumping on a train that
took him to the north side of the Liffey: "Nice mixup. Scene
at Westland row. Then jump in first class with third
ticket. Then too far. Train with engine behind. Might have
taken me to Malahide or a
siding for the night or collision. Second drink does it. Once
is a dose. What am I following him for? Still, he's the best
of that lot." Apparently some of the young men from Oxen
have walked northeast from Burke's to the station and Bloom
has jumped on a train following Stephen, who is bound for nighttown. But Eumaeus
suggests that something else happened at the station. Bloom
asks Stephen: "where, added he with a smile, will you sleep
yourself? Walking to Sandycove is out of the question. And
even supposing you did you won't get in after what
occurred at Westland Row station."
Several sentences later Bloom is "still thinking of the
very unpleasant scene at Westland Row terminus" when
Mulligan and Haines somehow conspired "to give Stephen the
slip," abandoning him and slipping off undetected to Sandycove
on a southbound train while Stephen, addled by alcohol, headed
in the other direction to Amiens Street to seek his beloved
whore Georgina Johnson. Whether Stephen was deceived by this
ruse is never made clear. Much earlier, at the end of Telemachus,
he has already decided, "I will not sleep here tonight. Home
also I cannot go."
