"Irishtown" is a suburb on the seacoast east of Dublin, south
of the River Liffey and north of Sandymount. The name dates to
the 15th century, when the English rulers of Dublin became
fearful of being outnumbered by the natives and enacted
statutes (consonant with the 1366 Statutes of Kilkenny) that
banned Irish people from living within the city limits or
doing business there past daylight hours. The natives built
their own shabbier town outside the walls. "Strasburg
terrace," where Stephen's Aunt Sara lives with her husband Richie Goulding and
their children, is a short row of townhouses slightly east of
Irishtown Road, the avenue that bisects the town from north to
south.
Later in the 20th century land was reclaimed from the sea on
the eastern edge of Irishtown, and now Strasburg Terrace is a
short dead-end street running eastward from Strand Street,
across from a small green. But in 1904 the sea lay just past
that little strip of land, so it would be very easy for
Stephen to turn northwest and walk across the sands to his
aunt's house. He stops and thinks about it: "His pace
slackened. Here. Am I going to aunt Sara's or not?"
After imagining the scene
that would greet him in the house he sees his feet heading northeast
toward the Pigeon House
and decides that he will not be visiting his relatives today.
(Or staying the night, either. Since he thinks that he will
not be returning to Mulligan's tower at the end of the day, it
seems possible that he has been thinking of asking the
Gouldings whether he could move in with them temporarily.)
In Hades the funeral carriages roll through
Irishtown on the Tritonville/Irishtown Road and, just past "Watery
lane," Bloom spots Stephen walking along the road.
Watery Lane, now Dermot O'Hurley Avenue, lies a few blocks
west of Strasburg Terrace, and Simon Dedalus supposes,
understandably but incorrectly, that his son has been visiting
the Gouldings. Bloom too wonders what Stephen has been up to.
In Aeolus he thinks back on the sighting: "Has a
good pair of boots on him today. Last time I saw him he had
his heels on view. Been walking in muck somewhere. Careless
chap. What was he doing in Irishtown?"
In Eumaeus Bloom is still thinking about the area:
"things always moved with the times. Why, as he reflected, Irishtown
strand, a locality he had not been in for quite a number
of years looked different somehow since, as it happened, he
went to reside on the north side." He decides that perhaps
Stephen was paying a call on a nice girl: "It was a thousand
pities a young fellow, blessed with an allowance of brains as
his neighbour obviously was, should waste his valuable time
with profligate women who might present him with a nice dose
to last him his lifetime. In the nature of single blessedness
he would one day take unto himself a wife when Miss Right came
on the scene but in the interim ladies’ society was a conditio
sine qua non though he had the gravest possible
doubts, not that he wanted in the smallest to pump Stephen
about Miss Ferguson (who was very possibly the particular
lodestar who brought him down to Irishtown so early in the
morning), as to whether he would find much satisfaction
basking in the boy and girl courtship idea." Miss Ferguson, of
course, is a creature of Bloom's imagination, prompted by
hearing Stephen recite Yeats'
Fergus poem. The female he is currently taken with,
Georgina Johnson, is precisely one of those "profligate
women."
An intrusion into section 13 of Wandering Rocks
shows the two old women whom Stephen observed on the beach
walking back to the south side of Dublin: "Two old women fresh
from their whiff of the briny trudged through
Irishtown along London bridge road." The London
Bridge crosses the River Dodder about a quarter of a mile
south of where the funeral cortège crosses it at Dodder
Bridge. Once it has passed over the bridge and departed
Irishtown, Londonbridge Road becomes Bath Avenue. The final
section of Wandering Rocks makes clear that the two
women have proceeded west along Bath Avenue and then southwest
along Haddington Road. The penultimate sentence of section 19
finds them "At Haddington road corner," watching the viceregal
cavalcade roll by on Northumberland Road from the corner of
those two streets.
