At the turn of the century the "Kildare street club" was
Dublin's most exclusive men's club, catering to the
Anglo-Irish gentry in a striking building just south of
Trinity College. Dress was important: Bloom thinks in Circe
of a "Kildare street club toff," and Tom Kernan proudly
supposes that his splendid
second-hand topcoat may once have turned heads there:
"Some Kildare street club toff had it probably." ("Toff,"
according to the OED, is "An appellation given by the
lower classes to a person who is stylishly dressed or who has
a smart appearance; a swell; hence, one of the well-to-do, a
'nob'.")
Founded in 1782 for males of the Ascendancy class, the Club
originally occupied a house on Kildare Street, and then two
houses, but by the 1850s it was doing so well that more space
was needed, and three houses on Kildare and Leinster Streets
were demolished to make space for a grand new L-shaped
structure. This new building, designed by Benjamin Woodward
and Thomas Newenham Deane, the architect who designed the National Library and
National Museum, opened in 1860. It featured highly
distinctive arched windows with pairs of slender columns
between them, and "whimsical beasts" carved around the bases
of the columns. These animals are often said to have been
carved by the O'Shea brothers, but Robert Nicholson attributes
the work to C. W. Harrison (Ulysses Guide, 176).
Perhaps the animals were playing in George Moore's mind when
he composed an unforgettable portrait of the club in the first
chapter of Parnell and His Island (1877):
The Kildare Street Club is one of the most important
institutions in Dublin. It represents in the most complete
acceptation of the word the rent party in Ireland; better
still, it represents all that is respectable, that is to say,
those who are gifted with an oyster-like capacity for
understanding this one thing: that they should continue to get
fat in the bed in which they were born. This club is a sort of
oyster-bed into which all the eldest sons of the landed gentry
fall as a matter of course. There they remain spending their
days, drinking sherry and cursing Gladstone in a sort of
dialect, a dead language which the larva-like stupidity of the
club has preserved. The green banners of the League are
passing, the cries of a new Ireland awaken the dormant air,
the oysters rush to their window—they stand there
open-mouthed, real pantomime oysters, and from the corner of
Frederick Street a group of young girls watch them in silent
admiration.
The Club had its own cricket ground, billiard rooms,
card-playing rooms, reading rooms, and drinking rooms. In his
notes for
Dubliners and
A Portrait of the Artist,
Gifford quotes one member to the effect that it was "the only
place in Ireland where one can enjoy decent caviar."
Independence in 1922 spelled the end of the club's growth and
the beginning of its slow decline. It eventually merged with
the Dublin University Club and moved to new premises on the
north side of St. Stephen's Green. The building on Kildare
Street still stands, but it is now used by other
organizations, particularly the Alliance Française.
