George's church
St. George's is a Protestant church a little southeast of the
Blooms' house on Eccles
Street, just across Dorset
Street. When Bloom crosses "to the bright side" of
Eccles in Calypso, he can see the sun "nearing the
steeple of George's church." At the end of the chapter he
hears the bells in the steeple winding up to sound the time:
"A creak and a dark whirr in the air high up. The bells of
George's church. They tolled the hour: loud dark iron."
(Determining "the hour" from the tolling of the bells is a
small enigma whose solution is "Quarter to," or 8:45.) The bells keep ringing
in Circe, Ithaca, and Penelope.
St. George's in the 1950s, seen from the perspective of Bloom's front door, looking southeast across Dorset Street. Source: William York Tyndall, The Joyce Country.
Detail of Bartholomew's Plan of Dublin, 1900. St. George's Church lies to the right of Dorset Street, Eccles Street to the left. Source: David Pierce, James Joyce's Ireland.