After Stephen and Lynch have walked down Denzille Lane and passed the point where it meets Denzille Street––accompanied, it would seem, by Mulligan, and followed by Bloom––they see a poster advertising the coming Dublin visit of Alexander John Dowie: "Christicle, who's this excrement yellow gospeller on the Merrion hall? Elijah is coming. Washed in the blood of the Lamb." As an evangelical church, Merrion Hall was presumably receptive to the posting of such notices. This one must be imagined as fairly large, because in Wandering Rocks Farrell sees "Elijah's name announced" from nearly a block away as he stands next to Wilde's house on the northwest corner of Merrion Square.

The church was at the bottom of Merrion Street Lower, one block north of the square. Alfred Gresham Jones designed it for the Plymouth Brethren, a nonconformist Protestant sect that started meeting in Dublin in the 1820s. Completed in 1863, the building was elegant and quite large. According to Christine Casey in Dublin: The City Within the Grand and Royal Canals (2005), its main hall could seat nearly 3,000 people and there was standing room for many more (559). The large preacher's platform was closely modeled on that of the Reformed Baptist church's Metropolitan Tabernacle in London––a fact which may possibly explain Joyce's error in referring to the church as "the Metropolitan Hall" in Wandering Rocks.

In The Encyclopaedia of Dublin, first published in 1991, Douglas Bennett observes that the church "had served a large congregation for many years, but attendance had dropped recently and the building was sold in 1990. It was extensively damaged by fire on 2 May 1991 The building was demolished and rebuilt as the Davenport Hotel, retaining the original Jones façade" (169).

Read More