ABSTRACT
In 1954 William York Tindall took a black-and-white photograph of this street. The photograph, which is reproduced in The Joyce Country (1960), is itself a period photograph, a half-way point between 1905 when the story was written and today’s date. Somehow, Tindall in a single shutter movement managed to capture something of the feeling and atmosphere of Joyce’s story and to hold it in place for later generations. A woman with a shopping bag walks toward the camera and on the other side of the road another woman attends to a child in a pram. The rows of imperturbable houses, flanked by an impressive display of heavily ornate black railings, face each other as they did in Joyce’s time. The Christian Brothers’ School on the left of the photograph, whose foundation stone was laid by Daniel O’Connell in 1828 and which Joyce perhaps attended for a short while before going to Belvedere College in 1894, betrays no sign of the home-time rush when the poorer class of boys would be set free. Meanwhile, the lamp-post, in splendid isolation, stands guard over the proceedings, keeping its own counsel from Joyce’s time to the time when this photograph was taken.
