Ashpit

Ashpit

In Brief

Contemplating the approach of middle age, the nearly 34-year-old Molly thinks of the unequal implications for men and women: "its all very fine for them but as for being a woman as soon as youre old they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ashpit." The bitterness of her reflection appears in her choice of image: ashpits were holes in the back gardens of houses where fireplace ashes were dumped, along with other sorts of household waste.

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Ashpits were brick- or concrete-lined holes for storing the ashes from household fires. Workers called dustmen periodically hauled away the ashes, which were used either as fertilizer or in the manufacture of bricks. But people also used these open pits as trash dumps, and it seems likely that they often received kitchen waste and the contents of chamberpots. Joyce emphasizes their foul smells. In "Araby" the narrator associates the odors of ashpits with those of lanes and stables fouled with horse shit: "The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness." (The "muddy lanes" and "foul lanes" in Joyce's fiction are alleys where street sweepers have not removed the piles of horse excrement.)

When Joyce was struggling with London publisher Grant Richards' objections to various kinds of perceived filth in Dubliners, he cited the rank odors of household waste dumps as emblematic of his book's uncompromising realism: "It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.” Molly's reference to ashpits at the end of Ulysses can be read as a retrospective glance at this dank olfactory realism in the collection of stories. The novel rescues its protagonists to some extent from the paralysis and futility foregrounded in the stories, and Molly regards her sexual attractiveness as her best hope of being something better than trash. Being thrown out in the soggy, festering "bottom of the ashpit" vividly conveys the loss of dignity that she fears.

In an informative blog (peterchrisp.blogspot.com/2022/11/james-joyces-ashpit.html), Peter Chrisp reports on the 2013 excavation of an ashpit behind the house at 8 Royal Terrace,  Fairview, where the Joyce family lived in 1900 and 1901. The dig turned up more than 250 magic lantern slides on religious subjects which appear to have belonged to a Presbyterian lay preacher who lived in the house from 1918 until his death in 1921. (The slides were probably dumped there after his death.) Chrisp notes a remarkable coincidence: according to Stanislaus Joyce, in 1901 the Joyce family discovered two books in that ashpit, one of them a bound copy of the four gospels that presumably belonged to the Protestant family that had been there before them (My Brother's Keeper, 113-14). Biographers Jackson and Costello remark that "The splendour of the trove may have been the origin of another of John Stanislaus Joyce's sardonic catchphrases when anything was in short supply: 'Have you tried the ash-pit?'" (John Stanislaus Joyce, 227).

There are intriguing connections here to the midden in Finnegans Wake where Biddy the hen pokes about and discovers the buried letter. A midden, Chrisp notes, "is an archaeological term for a mound of domestic refuse, often food remains (kitchen middens)." At one point in the Wake it is called "the orangeflavoured mudmound" (111). Joyce's fiction makes little distinction between such piles of damp, rotting organic matter and pits of fireplace ash. Presumably they sat next to one another in people's gardens or were simply mixed together. Chrisp quotes from a description of the lane behind Royal Terrace in part 5 of A Portrait of the Artist: "'The lane behind the terrace was waterlogged and as he went down it slowly, choosing his steps amid heaps of wet rubbish, he heard a mad nun screeching in the nuns’ madhouse beyond the wall.... He shook the sound out of his ears by an angry toss of his head and hurried on, stumbling through the mouldering offal, his heart already bitten by an ache of loathing and bitterness."

John Hunt 2024

The excavated ashpit behind 8 Royal Terrace, now Inverness Road, in Fairview. Source: peterchrisp.blogspot.com.


  1910 photograph of a London dustman. Source: peterchrisp.blogspot.com.