Several times in Ulysses, characters pass by the
statue erected on Sackville Street (the heart of the downtown,
now O'Connell Street)
to "Sir John Gray." Gray was a civic-minded patriot of many
accomplishments: physician, journalist, politician. More than
anyone else, he was responsible for the improvement in
Dublin's water supply in the 1860s—a great civic boon that
prompted the erection of the statue four years after Gray's
death in 1875.
As the funeral cortège passes up Sackville Street in
Hades, Simon Dedalus makes an anti-Semitic joke and "Mr
Power, collapsing in laughter, shaded his face from the window
as the carriage passed Gray's statue." At
the end of the next chapter, Aeolus, the men leave
the offices of the Freemans Journal to pursue some
drinks at Stephen's expense, and cross Sackville Street.
Considering Stephen's parable about Nelson's Pillar,
Professor MacHugh looks up the street from one monument to
another: "He halted on sir John Gray's pavement
island and peered aloft at Nelson through the
meshes of his wry smile." (In the photograph at right, the
modernist Spire of Dublin occupies the spot where Nelson's
pillar stood until the 1960s.)
Later in the afternoon, the jaunting
car carrying Blazes Boylan to the Blooms' house turns north
from the quays up Sackville Street, past several of the urban
landmarks noted in Hades: "Jingle by monuments of sir
John Gray, Horatio
onehandled Nelson, reverend father Theobald Mathew, jaunted
as said before just now. Atrot, in heat, heatseated." Sirens
also glances at "Elvery's
elephant" and "the
Rotunda, Rutland square," likewise noted in Hades.
Born to a Protestant family in County Mayo in 1815, Gray
received a medical degree from Trinity College in 1839 and
established a practice in Dublin. In the 1840s he worked as
the political editor of the Freemans
Journal and supported O'Connell's
movement to repeal the Act of
Union. He acquired joint ownership of the newspaper in
1841 and became its sole owner in 1850. During the three and a
half decades in which he ran the paper and held various
political offices (organizer of the Tenants' League, Dublin
city councillor, alderman of the Dublin Corporation, MP for
Kilkenny), Gray vigorously supported many nationalist causes:
repeal of the Union, disestablishment of the Church of
Ireland, land reform, reform of the court system, free
denominational education, Home Rule.
His most lasting fame, though, derived from his work to
secure a reliable source of clean water for Dublin. Chairing a
committee charged with finding an alternative to the tainted
supplies that regularly caused outbreaks of cholera and
typhoid in the city, he became a driving force in support of
the "Vartry scheme": a plan to dam the Vartry River in County
Wicklow and pipe water from the resulting reservoir to
Stillorgan, a suburb south of Dublin, whence it could be
distributed throughout the city. The dam was constructed in
the 1860s, and when Vartry water reached Dublin it immediately
improved public health. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland
knighted Gray in 1863, as the work began.
The statue on O'Connell Street was sculpted by Sir Thomas
Farrell, the same man who made the statue of William Smith
O'Brien just south of the river.