Dublin: Literary Pubs & Georgian Streets

Wilde arrived in eighteen seventy-one and was apparently not especially impressive to his professors at first. He graduated with a classics degree and a reputation for wit, then moved on to Oxford where his genius properly ignited. Beckett graduated in nineteen twenty-seven with a degree in modern languages, then spent years drifting between Dublin, Paris, and London before writing the plays that would make him one of the defining voices of the century. The gates you walked through are the same gates they walked through. Cities do this to you, if you let them.

Inside the campus, you're here for one specific treasure: the Book of Kells. It's kept in the Old Library, which was completed in seventeen thirty-two, and it is exactly as extraordinary as people say. The book is an illuminated manuscript Gospel produced by Celtic monks around eight hundred AD — the scholarly consensus points to the island monastery of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland, though it may have been completed on Irish soil after Viking raids forced the monks to relocate. For centuries it was kept at the monastery of Kells in County Meath, which is where it gets its name.

Open it to any page — and you can see several pages displayed in rotation — and what strikes you first is the sheer density and precision of the decoration. Intricate knotwork fills every margin. Animal forms twist into letters. Human faces emerge from abstract patterns. The artists who made this were working with quill pens and natural pigments on prepared calf skin, by lamplight, with no magnification, producing detail so fine that modern scholars studying it under microscopes have found patterns the naked eye cannot resolve. It is one of the most beautiful objects that has survived from early medieval Europe.

Upstairs from the Book of Kells is the Long Room, Trinity's famous two-storey library hall, one of the great spaces of the world. Two hundred thousand of the library's oldest books line the walls in double tiers from floor to barrel-vaulted ceiling, and the air has that particular smell of old paper and wood that functions as a kind of olfactory time machine. The Long Room also houses one of the oldest surviving harps in Ireland, which became the symbol of the Irish state. A harp on a pint glass, a harp on a passport — it came from here.

When you're ready to move on, head south through the college grounds and out toward Grafton Street, Dublin's main pedestrian thoroughfare, about three hundred metres south.

Dublin has always had this quality, and it runs directly into the literary tradition that makes this city so famous. The pub, the café, the street corner — these are the venues where Irish literary culture was forged, not in universities or salons. Joyce understood this, and he made it the very texture of his fiction. Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses, moves through the streets of Dublin on a single day — the sixteenth of June, nineteen oh four — and the city itself becomes the novel's true subject. Streets, pubs, shops, smells, sounds, the weight of the air off the Liffey. Joyce turned this city into the most thoroughly documented urban landscape in all of literature.

The sixteenth of June is now celebrated annually as Bloomsday, when devotees dress in Edwardian clothes and retrace Bloom's route, stopping at significant locations for readings and a drop of something fortifying. It is both a genuine celebration of a great novel and the most delightfully Irish thing imaginable: a pub crawl dressed up as a literary festival.

If you want a sense of Grafton Street at its most alive, come back at about eleven on a Saturday morning, when the buskers are set up, the flower sellers are arranged in colour, and the whole street operates as a kind of open-air theatre. But for now, walk south to the top of the street where Grafton meets the gates of St Stephen's Green, Dublin's great Georgian park, about three hundred metres ahead.

The Famine lasted roughly from eighteen forty-five to eighteen fifty-two, triggered by a blight that destroyed successive potato harvests. Ireland's population at the time was approximately eight million people, and the potato was the primary food source for the rural poor. The scale of what followed is almost impossible to comprehend: approximately one million people died of starvation and disease, and another million or more emigrated in the immediate years of crisis, with emigration continuing at enormous rates for decades afterward. By the time the Famine's long shadow had fully passed, Ireland's population had fallen by perhaps twenty-five percent. The country has never returned to its pre-Famine population.

The Famine drove the Irish diaspora — the vast communities of Irish descent in America, Australia, Britain, and across the world — and it poisoned relations with British rule for generations. The political energy that eventually produced the Irish independence movement was fertilised by the Famine's memory. And the literary tradition that made Dublin famous is inseparable from that history of dispossession and exile. Joyce wrote Ulysses from Trieste and Zurich, never returning to Ireland after nineteen twelve. Beckett wrote in French in Paris. Exile became almost a structural feature of Irish literary identity. The city produces writers, and then the writers leave, and then they write about the city they left. It is a pattern that has repeated itself for over a century.

Sit on a bench here for a moment if the weather allows. Watch the ducks. Then when you're ready, head east and north toward Merrion Square, Dublin's grandest Georgian square, about eight hundred metres away.

In the northwest corner of the square's central park, you'll find the statue of Oscar Wilde, installed in nineteen ninety-seven, and it is unlike any other public statue in Dublin or, arguably, in Europe. Most literary statues show their subjects standing solemnly, perhaps with a book. This one shows Wilde reclined on a large rock in a pose of elegant casualness, wearing a period frock coat and an expression of amused superiority. The sculpture has a surface that combines different types of stone — green marble, Norwegian thulite, pale stone — to create an almost painterly effect. Wilde is looking across the square toward number one, where he grew up as the son of the surgeon and folklorist William Wilde and the poet and nationalist Jane Francesca Wilde, who wrote under the name Speranza.

Wilde was born in Dublin in eighteen fifty-four and spent his formative years here before going to Trinity and then to Oxford. The Merrion Square house was his family home during his childhood and adolescence. He became arguably the greatest literary wit in the English language, and his plays — The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, Lady Windermere's Fan — remain among the most performed in the English-speaking world more than a hundred and twenty years after his death.

His end was devastating. Convicted in eighteen ninety-five for gross indecency following his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, he served two years of hard labour in Reading Gaol. He died in Paris in nineteen hundred, destitute and exiled from England, at the age of forty-six. The Irish state was slow to formally honour him — the twentieth century did not always know what to do with Wilde's complexity — but the statue here is now one of Dublin's most beloved landmarks. People sit beside him for photographs. He lends himself to the occasion with appropriate grace.

Alongside these are displays about the Viking period in Dublin, because this is something the city does not always shout about loudly enough: Dublin was founded by Vikings. The Norse established a longphort here — a fortified harbour base — around eight hundred and forty AD and it became a permanent settlement that grew into a trading town. The name Dublin comes from the Irish Dubh Linn, meaning Black Pool, referring to the dark tidal pool at the confluence of the Rivers Liffey and Poddle where the Norse anchored their ships. Wood Quay, just west of here toward Christ Church Cathedral, is the site of the most significant Viking archaeological excavation ever carried out in Ireland, and the discoveries made there in the nineteen seventies transformed understanding of Viking Dublin — only for most of them to be built over by the Dublin Corporation's civic offices. It remains one of the great missed opportunities in Irish heritage.

The museum also covers the events of eighteen ninety-eight through nineteen twenty-three in considerable depth — the United Irishmen's rebellion, the Fenian movement, the Land League, the Home Rule crisis, the Easter Rising of nineteen sixteen, the War of Independence, and the Civil War that followed the Anglo-Irish Treaty. These are not distant history here. They are within living memory of some of the oldest Dubliners, and the museum treats them with appropriate seriousness.

When you've had enough of history in glass cases, head northwest toward the Liffey and Temple Bar, about eight hundred metres away.

The cultural infrastructure here is genuine. The Irish Film Institute is in a converted Quaker meeting house on Eustace Street. The Gallery of Photography shows contemporary work. The Ark is a cultural centre for children. Project Arts Centre is one of the most important contemporary arts venues in the country. But what most visitors come for is the pub culture, and in Temple Bar that is delivered at volume and with some enthusiasm.

The Oliver St. John Gogarty on Fleet Street is one of the better known establishments, named for the Edwardian Dublin surgeon, writer, and wit who was Joyce's friend and then his enemy and finally his immortalisation as Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. The Palace Bar on Fleet Street, just outside the Temple Bar area proper, is one of the oldest and least changed pubs in Dublin — a Victorian interior of mahogany and etched glass that feels like it has been untouched since nineteen oh four. It was the unofficial headquarters of the Irish literary scene in the nineteen forties, when the poet Patrick Kavanagh and the novelist Flann O'Brien drank there regularly. You can sit in the same snug where they argued about poetry and drink a pint of Guinness that tastes exactly like theirs did.

Guinness, by the way, is one of those things that genuinely does taste different in Dublin than it does anywhere else. The nitrogen pour, the temperature of the cellar, the ritual of the two-part pour with its standing time — all of this is theatre, but it is also real. Stand at a bar in Temple Bar on a quiet afternoon, wait the two minutes while your pint settles, and you will understand why people make the argument.

Head west from Temple Bar through Dame Street to Dublin Castle, about four hundred metres.

The Easter Rising of nineteen sixteen did not happen here, but its aftermath did. Following the fighting that convulsed central Dublin for six days in April nineteen sixteen, the surviving leaders of the Rising were brought to Dublin Castle before being taken to Kilmainham Gaol for court martial and execution. The Rising itself was a military failure in tactical terms — the British army surrounded the rebel positions and the survivors surrendered after Easter week. But it was a political success of extraordinary consequence. The British decision to execute fourteen of the Rising's leaders transformed public opinion in Ireland. Men and women who had been indifferent or even hostile to the rebellion became its retrospective supporters when they read the names of the executed. Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Thomas Clarke — these are not just historical names in Ireland. They are household words in a way that is hard to fully communicate to anyone who did not grow up here.

The Rising led directly to the Irish War of Independence, which began in nineteen nineteen, and then to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of nineteen twenty-one and the establishment of the Irish Free State. On the eighteenth of January nineteen twenty-two, the British flag was lowered at Dublin Castle for the last time and the castle was formally handed over to the Irish provisional government. Michael Collins, who negotiated the Treaty, received the handover. It was, by any measure, one of the most consequential moments in twentieth-century Irish history. The castle now houses government offices, a conference centre, and museums, and you can walk freely through the courtyard where all of this happened.

Stand outside and look at the building's relationship to its surroundings. Christ Church sits on the ridge of the old Viking and medieval city, at the highest point of the original settlement, and it was deliberately positioned to be visible from the Liffey and from the roads approaching Dublin from the west. Everything around it has changed beyond recognition, but the cathedral's hill position still reads clearly. From here, Dublin's topography makes sense: the ridge running from the castle east toward the Liffey, the original Norse town below, the later medieval expansion spreading outward from this high ground.

The interior is worth seeing for the Romanesque stonework in the nave, some of which dates from the twelfth-century reconstruction, and for the crypt, which runs the full length of the building and is one of the largest medieval crypts in Ireland or Britain. The crypt is where a curious and famous object is displayed: the mummified remains of a cat and a rat, found lodged in an organ pipe in the nineteenth century, apparently having died there while the cat was chasing the rat. They are known locally as Tom and Jerry, because Dublin cannot resist a joke.

From Christ Church, walk south and west into the Liberties, heading toward St Patrick's Cathedral, about four hundred metres away.

Jonathan Swift was the Dean of St Patrick's from seventeen thirteen to seventeen forty-five, and he is buried here, along with his companion Esther Johnson, whom he called Stella. Swift was one of the greatest satirists in the English language — Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, The Drapier's Letters — and he used his pen as a political weapon on behalf of Irish interests against English economic exploitation. A Modest Proposal, published in seventeen twenty-nine, is an essay suggesting that the Irish poor could solve their poverty by eating their own babies. It is, of course, savage satire directed at the indifference of the English ruling class to Irish suffering. It remains one of the most devastating pieces of satirical writing in the language. Swift's epitaph, which he wrote himself in Latin and which is carved on a wall inside the cathedral, translates roughly as: "Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Divinity, Dean of this Cathedral, where fierce indignation can no longer tear the heart. Go, traveller, and imitate if you can this earnest and dedicated champion of liberty." It is one of the finest self-composed epitaphs in literary history.

The Liberties today is being transformed by Dublin's property boom, with new apartments and coffee shops pushing into streets that have been working-class for three centuries. The old Dublin of this neighbourhood — rough, tight-knit, proud of its identity — is not gone but it is under pressure. Walk through and notice which buildings are old and which are new, and what the contrast tells you about a city negotiating its past.

Guinness stout gets its characteristic dark colour and its slightly bitter, roasted flavour from barley that has been malted and then kilned at high temperatures — essentially, toasted until nearly burnt. The nitrogen dispense system that produces the creamy, cascading pour was introduced in nineteen ninety-nine and uses a mix of nitrogen and carbon dioxide rather than the carbon dioxide alone used for most draught beers. Nitrogen produces smaller bubbles, and smaller bubbles produce a smoother, creamier head. That is the science. The ritual — the two-part pour, the two minutes of standing, the toppling on of the dome of foam — is the theatre.

By the time you've climbed to the Gravity Bar with your pint, you'll be looking out over a city that has been more thoroughly written about, sung about, grieved for, and satirised than almost any other city of comparable size on earth. The Liffey runs through it to the east, green-brown and tidal. Georgian terraces spread south. The dome of the Four Courts sits on the north quays. Somewhere to the northeast, the spire of the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Marino catches the light. Beyond that, in every direction, is a city that was Viking, Norman, English, and Irish by turns, that survived famine and rebellion and civil war, that produced Swift and Wilde and Beckett and Joyce and a dozen other writers who changed the literature of the English language, and that is still, after all of that, unmistakably and defiantly itself.

Raise your glass. You've walked it. You've earned it.