Monumental builder
Monumental builder
In Brief
Soon after crossing the Royal Canal on the Phibsborough
Road—which becomes the Glasnevin (now Botanic) Road on the
north side—the funeral cortège veers left onto Finglas Road
for its "Last lap" to the cemetery, passing by "The
stonecutter's yard on the right." There, on a "spit of land"
jutting into the intersection, numerous stone grave sculptures
evoke the shades pressing forward
to speak to Odysseus in Homer's poem: "Crowded on the spit of
land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out
calm hands, knelt in grief, pointing. Fragments of shapes,
hewn. In white silence: appealing." After this somber echo,
the commercial language that follows strikes an anticlimactic
and even faintly mock-heroic note: "The best obtainable. Thos.
H. Dennany, monumental builder and sculptor."
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Joyce was, as usual, scrupulously following Thom's directory,
which listed a Thos. H. Dennany, "monumental builder and
sculptor, stone and marble works" at 2-8 Prospect Avenue, the
street that angles up to the cemetery between the Finglas and
Glasnevin roads. Thomas Hammond Dennany, born to ardently
nationalist parents in Drogheda in about 1840, was listed as a
"stonecutter" on Prospect Avenue as early as 1867. According
to a note by John Simpson on James Joyce Online Notes,
his brothers Arthur and Joseph also worked as stonecutters on
Phibsborough Road, listing themselves as "monumental workers"
on the 1911 census. According to Thom's, a fourth
brother, James, was working as a stonemason on Prospect Avenue
in 1910.
"Monument" is a common synonym for "gravestone" or
"headstone," but the use of the word in self-advertisements
also trumpeted the stone-cutters' execution of large
ceremonial sculptures. Simpson quotes from three stories in
the Freeman's Journal
from the 1870s, 80s, and 90s mentioning monumental Celtic
crosses that Thomas Dennany carved for notable Catholic
heroes. Among them was the piece shown here, sculpted for the
grave of John Keegan Casey,
the "Poet of the Fenians" who wrote the song The Rising of
the Moon and published articles in The Nation
under the pen-name "Leo." Vivien Igoe notes that the monuments
which Dennany contributed to the Glasnevin cemetery included
the splendid crypt that houses
Daniel O'Connell's sarcophagus.
When Dennany himself died in June 1910 he was buried in the
Glasnevin cemetery in an unmarked grave.
