Cludach: Cover

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With this issue, we complete a series of four historic photographs of Edwardian Dublin on our covers, offered in celebration of the Bloomsday Centennial this past June. Our final image shows a scene that would have been familiar to Joyce, but which had disappeared from the streets of Dublin by the time Ulysses appeared: a display of British military muscle in the heart of the city. Here, a group of Lancers parades past the front gates of Trinity College.

Like the Viceregal Cavalcade that rolls past the front of Trinity in "The Wandering Rocks" episode of Ulysses, this troop passes with an aura of aloofness, and an almost palpable ignorance of the people and the city that surrounds them. Later, in the "Circe" episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus has firsthand experience of this British sense of imperviousness when he is assaulted by Private Carr outside Bella Cohen's whorehouse in Nighttown. And in the final episode, "Penelope," we find the Lancers cropping up in Molly Bloom's erotic fantasies as her thoughts turn to military men.

This year's covers have all been drawn from the holdings of Ireland's National Photographic Archive, and in this case from the Clarke Collection. Acquired by the library in 2000, the Clarke Collection comprise the 67 glass plates and 270 prints of street scenes around central Dublin near the turn of the twentieth century, taken by the medical student and amateur photographer J. J. Clarke. These photographs open a window on a vanished Dublin. Some of Clarke's photographs were included in the archive's important 2001 exhibition Dubliners.

The photographic collections of the National Library of Ireland are housed in the National Photographic Archive in the Temple Bar area of Dublin. The archive incorporates a substantial storage area, controlled by an air plant system, together with darkrooms, and a conservation area. A useful on-line introduction to the National Library's photographic holdings—including many digitized photographs—can be viewed at http://www.nli.ie/new_archive.htm. 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.