Dublin by Lamplight: Locating Joyce's 'Clay' within the 1911 Census of Ireland

Abstract

Dublin by Lamplight:Locating Joyce's 'Clay' within the 1911 Census of Ireland Clara Cullen (bio) On the afternoon of 31 October in an unspecified year, Maria, the principal character of 'Clay' in James Joyce's Dubliners, was completing her domestic duties and making preparations for an evening's outing to Drumcondra for a Halloween celebration. In Joyce's short story, the place where Maria worked and lived was the Dublin by Lamplight laundry, a charitable institution in Ballsbridge. She is a Roman Catholic and employed as a domestic in the laundry, a position she had originally taken with some reservations. The annual directories of the day record that there was a laundry of the same name at 35 Ballsbridge Terrace, in the fashionable township of Pembroke on Dublin's southside.1 Joyce may have selected the title of the institution from a contemporary Thom's as being a more evocative name than the other establishments listed among Dublin's benevolent charitable institutions there. Alternatively, as some commentators have suggested, he may have based his story 'Clay' there and used the name because the main character Maria was, in real life, a distant relative of the Joyce family.2 Whatever the reason, a comparison of the institution depicted and described in 'Clay' with the information provided in the 1901 and 1911 Censuses of Ireland for the real institution of the same name indicates striking parallels between the fictive and the actual Dublin by Lamplight laundry. Joyce wrote 'Clay' in 1904, after he had left Dublin, as one of a series of epiclets on Dubliners, originally intended for publication in the Irish Homestead under the pseudonym 'Stephen Daedalus'.3 Although Joyce returned to Dublin several times after his departure, particularly in 1913 to attempt to get the Dubliners collection published, the story was written from his experiences and memories of an earlier era of the city and its people. Joyce wrote to his friend Constantine Curran in 1937 that 'every day in every way I am walking along the streets of Dublin and along the strand'.4 Therefore it seems appropriate that as both of the censuses which make available details of [End Page 19] Ireland in 1901 (just before Joyce left Dublin for the first time) and that of 1911 are now freely accessible online, they should be utilized to underline how detailed and engrained Joyce's knowledge was of the citizens of his native town.5 Located on the banks of the River Dodder, there had been a Dublin by Lamplight laundry in existence since 1856,6 fifty years before Joyce immortalized it in 'Clay'. It was a long-established 'charitable institution for Penitent Females',7 which was 'supported by voluntary contributions and by the inmates own exertions' and which offered 'an excellent laundry [...] with all modern appliances' at moderate terms.8 Its name was derived from the purpose for which it had been established: a charitable mission to rescue and offer asylum to women who were prostitutes (and this was a group of women with whom Joyce would have been familiar from his adventures in the neighbourhood of Dublin's 'Nighttown'). The stated mission of the institution was 'the eternal salvation of the unhappy ones who have been led [sic] captive by the devil, and have fallen through his devices'.9 One of a number of 'Homes for Fallen Women or Penitentiaries' (also referred to as asylums) in Dublin at the end of the nineteenth century, it was a Protestant institution. This religious background is reflected in the pious tracts on the walls of the laundry that so bothered Maria in 'Clay'. Nevertheless, the story describes her as being happy there, with her own money in her pocket and her plants: 'She used to have such a bad opinion of protestants but now she thought they were very nice people, a little quiet and serious, but still very nice people to live with' (D 'Clay' 83.40-4). The mission was a typical example of the charitable efforts of women philanthropists in Victorian Dublin to save poor females from a life of sin.10 There was ample need for these altruistic initiatives. Late nineteenth-century Dublin was a...