Denzille lane boys

Read More

The group of boys is raucous––one shouts out, "Jay, look at the drunken minister coming out of the maternity hospal!" They are also beggars: one asks for "A make, mister." Make was slang for a halfpenny; according to Brewer's Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable it was "universal throughout Ireland" until the late 1960s. Someone in the group of medical students reacts aggressively to the request––"Hell, blast ye!"––and then someone else more quietly tells them to be on their way: "Scoot." The gentler voice seems to belongs to Bloom, because someone uses a typically Jewish name to thank him for dismissing the beggars: "Righto, Isaacs, shove em out of the bleeding limelight." And then someone invites this helpful outsider to join their company: "Yous join uz, dear sir? No hentrusion in life. Lou heap good man. Allee samee dis bunch." The mongrel slang, which appears to incorporate stereotypically Native American ("heap"), Black American ("dis"), and Chinese American ("allee samee") idioms into natively Irish ("Yous"), and English lowlife talk, does not in any way obscure the sense: Will you join us, kind sir? It would be no intrusion at all. You're a very good man, and we're all alike here (your Jewish heritage notwithstanding).

At the pub's closing hour the group starts north toward Denzille Street, but then they turn back the way they came ("Bout ship"), because one of them hears a fire engine to the south ("Mount street way") roaring off to fight a blaze. At this point the group threatens to break apart, and almost certainly does. The person urging his companions to run up Holles Street to catch a glimpse of the fire engine apparently fails to convince everyone: "Tally ho. You not come? Run, skelter, race." At least two of the group, Stephen and Lynch, turn off Holles into Denzille Lane as an alternative route to the Westland Row train station, where they plan to catch a train up to Monto: "Denzille lane this way. Change here for Bawdyhouse." It makes sense that Stephen would not want to run all the way to Mount Street, given his advanced state of inebriation. It also stands to reason that some of the medicals might want to return to the hospital.

From the dialogue it appears that Stephen and Lynch are not alone on Denzille Lane. As they jabber back and forth one of them notices that they are being followed: "Whisper, who the sooty hell's the johnny in the black duds? Hush! Sinned against the light." This can only be Bloom, and in Circe it becomes clear that he has followed Stephen all the way to Nighttown. In Eumaeus Bloom reflects on "the very unpleasant scene at Westland Row terminus when it was perfectly evident that the other two, Mulligan, that is, and that English tourist friend of his, who eventually euchred their third companion, were patently trying as if the whole bally station belonged to them to give Stephen the slip in the confusion, which they did." Mulligan and Haines have arranged to meet at Westland Row station, and the dialogue suggests that Mulligan gets there by tagging along with Stephen and Lynch: "Strike up a ballad. Then outspake medical Dick to his comrade medical Davy." Once at the station, Mulligan catches a train back to Sandycove with his English friend.

Gifford notes that "The Denzille lane boys" was "A Dublin slang name for the Invincibles," the Fenian group who committed the Phoenix Park murders on 6 May 1882. He does not cite a source for this information, and I have not been able to find any evidence of it, but the claim seems plausible. In a personal communication Vincent Altman O'Connor recalls the factional fighting waged throughout the 18th century by violent gangs of poor young men in Dublin called the Liberty Boys (Protestants who worked for weavers on the south side of the river) and the Ormond Boys (Catholics from the north bank who were butchers). In the years closer to the time of the novel, various gangs in other countries sporting similar names fought similar factional battles. Ike Clanton's Cowboys in Arizona, represented in Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War, violently maintained the convictions of the old South in the years after the Civil War. The Bowery Boys, represented in The Gangs of New York, waged war on Catholics in New York City. The Billy Boys of Glasgow, represented in Peaky Blinders, did the same thing in the 1920s. It seems possible that Catholic gangs in Dublin may have carried similar names within Joyce's lifetime.

Dublin developed a militantly nationalistic Catholic underworld in the years before and after the failed Fenian revolt of the 1860s, and the roots it put down in the Denzille area are many and deep. James Carey lived at 19A Denzille Street, a street renamed Fenian Street after independence, and the back door of his house fronted on Denzille Lane. Altman O'Connor notes that according to the Dictionary of Irish Biography James Fitzharris, a.k.a. Skin-the-Goat, lived opposite Carey in Denzille Street "For a time," and according to the census records he also lived at 2 Upper Erne Street, just north of Burke's pub. Knives used in the Phoenix Park attack were discovered in a house that Carey owned on nearby South Cumberland Street. In Lotus Eaters Bloom thinks of Carey (or his brother Peter, another Fenian) attending services every day at St. Andrew's church, whose back door is on South Cumberland. He also thinks of Meade's timberyard, surrounded by "Ruins and tenements," at the bottom of that street. Its owner employed Carey, and the two men were evidently close because Carey transferred his assets to Meade prior to his banishment from Ireland. Denzille Lane itself was full of tenements––fertile breeding ground for revolutionary sentiment.

Such history suggests that the impoverished "Denzille lane boys" should perhaps be regarded as a living reminder of the Invincibles, much as Bloom functions as a living reminder of ancient Greek heroes.

(For more on the Liberty and Ormond Boys, listen to episode 4 of Donal Fallon's excellent podcast Three Castles Burning, "Gangs of Old Dublin: Liberty Boys and Ormond Boys (with Cathy Scuffil)" (2020), at threecastlesburning.libsyn.com. There is also a book on the subject, The Liberty and Ormond Boys: Factional riot in eighteenth-century Dublin (2005), by James Kelly.)