James Joyce’s Dublin: a city of contrasts

James Joyce once declared that if Dublin “one day suddenly disappeared from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book [Ulysses]”. In one respect, it is easy to challenge this comment since Joyce did not describe the urban landscape in any detail and the reader gets little sense of what the streets looked like over 100 years ago. At the same time, much of Dublin’s urban life is captured in Ulysses and in Dubliners and it is reasonable to argue that Joyce offers a sense of what life in the city was like; whether it is the interior of Barney Kiernan’s pub in Little Britain Street in the Cyclops episode or the sweaty world of Monto, the busy red-light district in the Circe episode. In...