Watchman

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Stuart Gilbert remarks that the unusual words in these phrases ("the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps" and "the watchman going about serene") "may strike the reader as being too 'precious', and unlikely to be used by Molly Bloom. They are, as a matter of fact, echoes of common Spanish words which she used to hear at Gibraltar; vago, a vagrant, and sereno, the watchman's cry as he goes his rounds, 'All's well––sereno!'" (James Joyce's Ulysses, 378-79n). The cry of sereno (calm, quiet, peaceful) became attached to the watchmen themselves in Spain and that title is still used today, even though watchmen no longer trudge through the streets uttering loud cries but merely post guard––like Gumley, the "night watchman" mentioned in Aeolus. In Eumaeus he is nothing more than a stationary and possibly somnolent form in a dark "sentrybox."

In the days before streetlights and alarm clocks, cities employed men to patrol the dark streets, watching for trouble and also calling out the time to people in their houses. In a short 24 March 2016 web post on AHS: The Story of Time (www.ahsoc.org), Peter de Clercq reports a detail from  Judith Flanders's The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (2012): "for a small fee, a watchman might act as a mobile alarm clock, stopping at houses along his route, to waken anyone who needed to be up at a specific time." He also cites the exasperation of a character in Tobias Smollett's Humphrey Clinker (1771): "I start every hour from my sleep, at the horrid noise of the watchmen bawling the hour through every street, and thundering at every door; a set of useless fellows, who serve no other purpose but that of disturbing the repose of the inhabitants."

The "lamp" that such men carried was no doubt useful for navigating dark lanes, spying out mischief, and preventing attacks. Watchmen also evidently carried weapons for self-defense should their weak circle of light prove an insufficient deterrent to violence. In the photograph displayed here, one of London's last night watchmen wears a cutlass in a hanger at his hip and carries some kind of stick in his right hand. (According to one website that displays this photograph, www.londonpicturearchive.org.uk, he also has a large rattle tucked beneath his sash––rather like the bearbells that some hikers attach to their packs or poles to let grizzlies know that they are approaching.) Thomas Rowlandson's depiction of a late 18th century night watchman making his rounds in London shows something greatly resembling an Irish shillelagh in his right hand, and another of his drawings shows a watchman being attacked by townspeople. All three representations suggest that serenity was not the most distinctive condition of night watchmen in European cities.

But Molly thinks of them in the midst of her rhapsodic revery about the beauties of Gibraltar at the end of Penelope, just after remembering the vagrants who slept on the streets of Algeciras during the day. Unlike her husband, who displays considerable apprehension in rough parts of town, she seems to be relatively unfazed by gritty urban realities.