Cludach: Cover

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In this Joycean year, we continue our presentation of images from the approximate era of Ulysses—this time, by offering an 1888 photograph of Michael's Lane. We have grown used to seeing images of Dublin in Joyce's day present an energetic cityscape: trams, shop fronts, and bustling streets. Here, we see another Dublin—a city's underside, literally in the shadow of Christ Church Cathedral. Although this particular street is never mentioned by the novelist, the harsh reality of the urban poverty depicted here could never be far from Joyce's consciousness. Indeed, Michael's lane is only a stone's throw from Marsh's Library, where—as we learn in the Proteus episode of Ulysses—Stephen Dedalus prided himself on his acquisition of esoteric knowledge. Surely, walking into the gritty day-to-day life of Michael's Lane, where the precarious economic lives of the poor were much in sight, would give the lie to his pretensions of escape.

This image is drawn from the William Lawrence Photography Collection, a major holding of Ireland's National Photographic Archive consisting of 40,000 glass plate negatives from 1870-1914. The images were produced commercially by the Lawrence Studio, which opened on Sackville Street in 1865, and which was a major producer of postcards and viewbooks for the tourist trade of its day. The Lawrence Collection was acquired by National Library of Ireland in 1943. Many of the images have now been digitized and can be seen on the library's search on-line catalog at http://www.nli.ie/new_archive.htm; scholarly researchers and casual visitors alike will find this database an astounding window on Ireland's history, both urban and rural.

We thank the National Photographic Archive/An tAircív Náisiúnta Grianghrafadóireachta, and especially its curator, Sara Smyth, for its kind permission to present this photograph to the readers of New Hibernia Review.