Merrion Square

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In the second half of the 18th century Richard FitzWilliam, an Anglo-Irish nobleman who lived in Mount Merrion, a suburb several miles south of Dublin, sponsored a plan to build Georgian townhouses around a lushly planted central square, as part of a larger movement of moneyed families from the north side of the city to the south. This movement was spurred by the decision of the Earl of Kildare (later Duke of Leinster) to build a palatial residence there in 1745. Over the last four decades of the century a rectangle was plotted to the east of Leinster House, houses were built around it, and greenery was planted. For most of the 19th century the square was primarily residential, and until the 1970s access to the fenced green was permitted only to local key-holders. But by 1904 commerce had begun to encroach on the elegant development, albeit in the highly genteel form of medical offices. Slote and his collaborators quote from Cosgrave and Strangways's Dictionary of Dublin (1895): "The north side is mostly occupied by doctors" (223).

The section begins, "Almidano Artifoni walked past Holles street, past Sewell's yard." Having missed his tram at College Green, Artifoni has started walking home along Nassau Street and now, according to Clive Hart's calculations, about ten minutes have passed. He has passed the National Maternity Hospital at the northeast corner of Merrion Square and is starting along Lower Mount Street. Thom's 1904 directory lists James Walter Sewell and Son and James Simpson as the proprietors of a "horse repository, commission, and livery establishment" at 60 Lower Mount Street. Trailing Artifoni on earlier blocks of the same concourse are two other men: "Behind him Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, with stickumbrelladustcoat dangling, shunned the lamp before Mr Law Smith's house and, crossing, walked along Merrion square. Distantly behind him a blind stripling tapped his way by the wall of College park." Philip H. Law Smith was a barrister at 14 Clare Street, on the northwest edge of the square. College Park, the walled cricket fields of Trinity College on the north side of Nassau Street, lies still further west on the same sequence of streets.

In Lestrygonians Farrell passes Bloom on Westmoreland Street, probably headed to his accustomed haunt in the National Library. In an interpolation in section 14 of Wandering Rocks he is seen striding "past the Kildare Street club," presumably having left the library and begun his present course up Nassau Street and its continuations, ultimate destination unknown. The blind piano tuner likewise has been seen on the streets before. Hart describes his known movements: "Not long after he is helped by Bloom across Dawson Street, at about 1:45 PM [in Lestrygonians], the tuner makes his way to the Ormond Hotel, to tune the piano at what would, from the point of view of both the proprietor and the customers, be the most convenient time, the period shortly after lunch. At about 3:10 PM, having forgotten his tuning fork, he makes his slow way back to the centre of Dublin. When we see him in section 17, walking behind Artifoni but ahead of the cavalcade, he has already spent a good deal of his afternoon merely getting from one place to another" (James Joyce's Dublin, 53). 

Farrell continues east along Merrion Square North, dodging outside every lamp post, but when he gets to "Mr Lewis Werner's cheerful windows" he turns around and goes back the way he came. Louis Werner was a ophthalmic surgeon whose offices were at 31 Merrion Square North, on the corner of Holles Street near the northeastern edge of the park. Slote observes that "He is not the same Louis Werner mentioned in Hades" and reports that, according to Kenny's Bookshop and Art Galleries 75 Years (2015), "The windows of his consulting room at Merrion Square were adorned with stained glass windows" (16). Farrell halts again "At the corner of Wilde's house" before continuing into Clare Street. Oscar Wilde's parents moved into the house at 1 Merrion Square, at the park's northwest corner, in 1855 when he was only an infant, and he lived there into his early 20s. His father Sir William Wilde was an oto-ophthalmic surgeon of great renown. In 1904 the Wildes were gone and a dental surgeon named Charles H. Dowling was on the premisses.

Standing in front of this house, Farrell stares to the southwest, frowningly, at "the distant pleasance of duke's lawn" on the back side of Leinster House. A "pleasance," according to the OED, is "A pleasure-ground, usually attached to a mansion; sometimes a secluded part of a garden, but more often a separate enclosure laid out with shady walks, trees and shrubs, statuary, and ornamental water." Such a grand bit of gardening is exactly what the Duke of Leinster commissioned, as the photograph here illustrates. Farrell is then said to look northward at "Elijah's name announced on the Metropolitan hall," which is puzzling, because Metropolitan Hall was on Abbey Street, north of the river and thus impossible for him to see. Gifford concludes that Farrell must instead be looking "at Merrion Hall, which is off to his left, on the corner of Denzille Lane (now Fenian Street) and Merrion Street Lower, the northerly extension of Merrion Square West." At the end of Oxen of the Sun, he notes, Stephen and Lynch spot a poster on the wall of that building after walking down Denzille Lane: "Christicle, who's this excrement yellow gospeller on the Merrion hall? Elijah is coming. Washed in the blood of the Lamb." Merrion Hall, Slote notes, was an Evangelical church––consistent with posting a notice of John Alexander Dowie's visit.

Moving on, Farrell walks west on "Clare Street" past "Mr Bloom's dental windows." Marcus J. Bloom, no relation to Leopold though both men had Jewish fathers who converted to Catholicism prior to marriage, was a dental surgeon whose office was at 2 Clare Street. At this spot the "dustcoat" of the fiercely striding, word-grinding madman nearly knocks down the blind piano tuner, who is moving east on the same sidewalk. The disabled boy hurls a curse at the back of his distracted and seemingly indifferent assailant. The possible confusion created by the mention of a second Bloom adds to the confusion of a second Louis Werner moments earlier, and both build on the close conjunction of "Jimmy Henry" and "Henry Clay" in section 15. Wandering Rocks forces its readers to navigate the tricky turns of language as well as geography.

Merrion Square was the home of moneyed Anglo-Irish families as well as prominent Protestant writers W. B. Yeats and George Russell, and its luxuriant shaded paths were off-limits to ordinary Dubliners. In Sirens Simon Dedalus remembers the night when Ben Dollard went to the Blooms' house to rent some concert attire and found grand things there–– "luxurious operacloaks," and "Balldresses, by God, and court dresses." He sums up such posh finery in the phrase, "Merrion square style."