The Joyce Project : Ulysses : Trinity's surly front

Trinity's surly front

Trinity's surly front

In Brief

§ As Bloom walks south from Westmoreland Street toward Grafton Street in Lestrygonians, he passes between the busy traffic on College Green and the iron railings of Trinity College, Dublin: "His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly, shadowing Trinity's surly front. Trams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging." The large door of Trinity's main entrance stands in an imposing four-story Palladian wall adorned with Corinthian columns. § The word that the narrative applies to this grand facade once referred to the manner of an aristocrat ("sir," hence the original spelling "sirly"). The OED lists a rare obsolete meaning of "Lordly, majestic" and the more common old meaning "Masterful, imperious; haughty, arrogrant, supercilious." In modern democratic times the quality of supercilious haughtiness associated with feudal lords has given the word purely negative connotations. Joyce no doubt intends these more familiar meanings too, since he associates Trinity with the reactionary politics and social snobbery of the ruling class.

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Trinity College was founded under letters patent from Queen Elizabeth in 1592 as the first college of a University of Dublin intended to resemble Oxford and Cambridge. Although it has remained the university's sole college, Trinity has a long and distinguished history of teaching and research, and many of Ireland's greatest writers and thinkers have earned degrees there. Historically a bastion of Anglo-Irish Protestants, it functioned throughout the 18th century as the preserve of the newly empowered Ascendancy class. In the last few decades of that century the college admitted Catholics, but until 1793 they could not graduate without swearing unconscionable oaths of allegiance to the Anglican establishment.

During the 19th century Trinity abolished all doctrinal tests, but strong resentments persisted on both sides of the sectarian divide. In 1871, responding to the successful 1854 establishment of a Catholic university (Joyce's alma mater), Catholic bishops banned their parishioners from attending Trinity (a ban which some Catholics, like Oliver St. John Gogarty, ignored). In the final decades of the century, when Irish politics were defined by the contest between defenders of Union and proponents of Home Rule, Trinity faculty and students firmly espoused the Unionist cause.

In Lestrygonians Joyce alludes to many key aspects of this bitter divide, starting with the 1800 Act of Union. Sixteen paragraphs before he sees the college's "surly front," Bloom's path of travel takes him past the Bank of Ireland building, but the narrative does not refer to it in that way: "Before the huge high door of the Irish house of parliament a flock of pigeons flew." When the Irish Parliament was abolished, the building that had housed it was sold, with the condition that it could never again be restored to its original use.

More political resonances follow. As Bloom walks past the bank he sees uniformed police officers exiting from a station on "College street," on the north side of the campus. They make him think of the massive protests that filled Dublin's streets in December 1899, on "the day Joe Chamberlain was given his degree in Trinity." Awarding an honorary degree to the chief government architect of British imperial warmongering in South Africa was a polemical choice designed to demonstrate Ireland's acquiescence in the scheme. It backfired, causing Catholics to take to the streets to show that the university's political views were not those of all Irish men and women. Bloom remembers the violent crackdown by policemen and soldiers, as well as the counter-demonstrators who spilled out of the campus to confront the protesters: "And the Trinity jibs in their mortarboards. Looking for trouble." Then he thinks more broadly of republican insurrectionists, anticolonial political movements, plainclothes spies, and police informants.

After these sixteen paragraphs evoking more than a century of struggle between Anglo-Irish Protestant rulers and Catholics seeking a voice in the government of their country, Joyce's "surly front" resounds with implied meanings. The Trinity facade is majestic, masterful, lordly, as befits the ruling class that the college serves. But to middle-class Catholics excluded from its classrooms and opposed to its Unionist politics it appears haughty and arrogant, and probably also surly in the modern sense: churlish, sullen, ill-humored, uncivil. Joyce points up these implications by having "a heavy cloud" occlude the sun as Bloom approaches the college, casting its stonework into shadow. The narrative notes that "His smile faded," and in the four paragraphs that follow this meteorological event his thoughts become very dark, just as they did when a cloud blotted out the sun in Calypso. The effect of this entire section of Lestrygonians is to make Trinity a darkly forbidding place associated with political repression and social exclusion.

One of the most eminent Trinity dons of Joyce's era, John Pentland Mahaffy, the distinguished classicist, brilliant conversationalist, and devout royalist who mentored both Oscar Wilde and Gogarty, represented a level of educational excellence to which poor Catholics could not hope to gain access. In his biography of Joyce, Richard Ellmann observes that at this time Trinity "had a more distinguished faculty" than did University College, and he records Mahaffy's remark that "James Joyce is a living argument in favor of my contention that it was a mistake to establish a separate university for the aborigines of this island––for the corner-boys who spit into the Liffey" (58). Ellmann does not provide a date for this remark or speculate about whether Joyce knew of it, but it is certainly surly, in all senses of that word.

John Hunt 2023

Photograph probably taken by Robert French ca. 1900, held in the National Library of Ireland, showing the front of Trinity College from the south with the former Irish Parliament building at left and Westmoreland Street to its right. Source: Wikimedia Commons.


A nearly identical scene displayed on a color postcard postmarked 20 May 1904. Source: Vincent Van Wyk.


The same scene yet again, in a colored drawing of police forces confronting protesters hoisting the flag of the Transvaal on College Green in 1899, published in the illustrated French news magazine Le Petit Journal.
Source: comeheretome.com.


J. P. Mahaffy, in a photograph of unknown date. Source: Wikimedia Commons.