When Stephen says that he has no place to spend the night,
Corley tells him that "There was a dosshouse in Marlborough
street, Mrs Maloney’s, but it was only a tanner touch and full
of undesirables." A tanner was
6d., quite cheap for a night's lodging. For 4-6 pence,
establishments called doss-houses, or kip-houses, or common
lodging-houses, would put people up in crowded, bad-smelling
dormitory rooms.
Gifford notes that Marlborough Street lies just a bit west of
where Stephen and Corley are standing, and that the 1904
edition of Thom's
does not list a Mrs. Maloney on Marlborough, but does list
many "tenements." Since Thom's did not list names in
connection with tenements, it is possible that one of these
derelict buildings did house a Mrs. Maloney's, but for Joyce's
purposes the veracity of the name may not have mattered much
in the anonymous sea of Dublin's tenements. That a doss-house,
as opposed to a more respectable boarding-house, would have
resided in one of these buildings is almost certain.
On his website dedicated to British workhouses,
www.workhouses.org.uk, Peter Higginbotham observes that
doss-houses "were notorious for their overcrowding." The daily
fee, he notes, "bought a bed or, in many cases, a share of a
bed. Not only was bed-sharing common, but some establishments
operated a two-relay system where a bed was occupied by one
person during the day, and another by night. In some cases, a
three-relay system shared a bed in three eight-hour shifts. /
As well as the bed, a doss-house could provide access to a
kitchen which also served as a common-room. In smaller lodging
houses, the proprietor might even supply breakfast."
Higginbotham quotes at length from author Jack London's vivid
account of staying at a large London doss-house. Size, in
London's experience, generally meant improved quality: "The
little private doss-houses, as a rule, are unmitigated
horrors. I have slept in them, and I know; but let me pass
them by and confine myself to the bigger and better ones." He
observes that even at the larger establishments the nauseating
smells, grimly uncongenial society, and complete lack of
homelike surroundings made a mockery of the commonly used
phrase, "The poor man's hotel." At some, paying an extra penny
(say, 5d. instead of 4d.) would entitle one to an individual
"cabin," but these were cubicles rather than rooms: spaces
barely bigger than a bed with no ceiling, no door, no
facilities for storing one's possessions from day to day, and
no way of blocking out the snores of all the surrounding
sleepers.
Doss-houses catered mostly to unmarried workers in Dublin's
vast proletarian underclass, and were only a small step above
the charitable workhouses that offered a place to sleep in
return for hard labor or religious self-improvement. Of all
the options of places to stay the night that Stephen ponders
on June 16—the Martello
tower, his aunt Sara's
house in Irishtown, Bloom's house—the poor man's hotel
on Marlborough Street is by far the grimmest.
In Cyclops, the unnamed narrator says that Bob Doran's mother-in-law,
Mrs. Mooney, "kept a kip in Hardwicke street." A "kip,"
in Irish parlance, is a dive: a seedy, filthy establishment.
The narrator's use of this word for Mrs. Mooney's
boarding-house is a slander in keeping with his reference to
her "procuring rooms to street couples." In Joyce's story "The
Boarding House," Mrs. Mooney caters to a better-off clientele
and does not rent beds by the night. Her "young men paid
fifteen shillings a week for board and lodgings (beer or stout
at dinner excluded). They shared in common tastes and
occupations and for this reason were very chummy with one
another." Mrs. Mooney is charging more than four times what
Mrs. Maloney charges, and she clearly maintains some semblance
of welcoming strangers into a middle-class home. The story
does mention, however, that the boarding house "was beginning
to get a certain fame," suggesting sexual irregularities—so
perhaps it has declined by the time represented in Ulysses,
and the narrator of Cyclops is not entirely off base.
