Only a few cities evoke those clear images that feed the mind and imagination of successive generations or represent for posterity the spirit of an age: Johnson's London, Louis Napoleon's Paris, Brecht's Berlin. And so also the Dublin of Yeats and Joyce. This “literary” Dublin has long fascinated specialist and student alike. And little wonder, for ever since the creative genius of her most famous son reincarnated the wandering Ulysses in the person of a Dublin Jew, the city on the Liffey has become a" world city"—a world city of the literary imagination. There is another Dublin, again a Dublin of Yeats and Joyce, but one that evokes harsher images and nurtures little of the interest reserved for the milieu of dramatist and poet. This, the nether world of tenement and slum, of the poor and unemployed, is in large part the subject of this study. The city as a field of study in its own right has over the past decade or so attracted the concentrated attention of social historians. Much of their concern is with the darker side of the urban experience. In fact, urban historians have been accused by professional colleagues of being obsessed with the" pathology" of the city as evidenced by an apparent desire to quantify misery. When Constantia Maxwell introduced her portrait of Georgian Dublin almost half a century ago, she half-apologized to her Irish readers for including such disagreeable features of the pre-industrial city as a lack of sanitation and the frequent appearance of epidemic disease. But no constraints deter the contemporary urban historian from wading knee-deep into the detritus of the urban past to retrieve some sense of the physical and emotional hazards, frightful living conditions and penurious circumstances that daily laid siege to the well-being of the less fortunate in cities and towns. This is strong stuff and suggests that in addition to a clear head the writer (and reader, too) had better possess a strong stomach. Yet the historian is the victim of his sources, and when these relate to an assessment of the urban experience they can, to say the least, discourage optimism. The characterizations are now familiar-" infernal wen,”" cruel habitations,"" eternal slum." In the case of Dublin the historical portrait exhibits the same dark hues and invites no less grim a description.