Dublin: The Making of a Capital City by David Dickson (review)

To write a history of Dublin is a daunting challenge. Not that approaching the city’s story is any more difficult technically than engaging that of other urban areas of comparable age (about 1,100 to 1,200 years of settlement). The challenge is the actual writing—the composition of a large narrative about a city that has been chronicled more skillfully and creatively in the twentieth century than any other capital city in Europe. To write against the metric presented by James Joyce requires a touch of heroism.

Dickson, however, carries it off successfully, but not by engaging in anything innovative. There is nothing new in his method; indeed, the techniques in the volume could have been employed in 1920. It is a classic form, a straightforward narrative. But Dickson tells his story shrewdly. He is a pedestrian in the sense that he walks through Dublin and spools through time. The streets and lanes of the city become more and more familiar as Dickson strides through the centuries. His main interest is from 1600 onward, and he takes the narrative to the year 2000. For the most part, he focuses upon the interplay of mainstream political developments and the size and conformation of the urban area. Matters of economic development are presented linearly rather than analytically. He offers little in the way of sharp social-class analysis, but he makes some keen observations about cultural matters, such as reading habits, public amusements, and the theater. He approaches religion mostly through architecture, and he deals with the content of the faiths and the depth of sectarian division obliquely.

Dickson’s embrace of the classic narrative form is fully self-confident. Thus, the book is much less visual in its presentation than are most Dublin histories written in the twentieth century or, indeed, in the nineteenth. There are only six maps, and none of them is sufficiently detailed to marry with the text. The twenty-six other plates are seemingly random. Nothing in this book intersects with any of the versions of the “new” urban history, and that is the point: This is a big book, heavily researched and thoroughly assured, and its triumph is that one would like to have it nearby when re-reading any of Joyce’s evocations of Dublin.