Molly's fond memories of Gibraltar near the conclusion of her
monologue include "the night we missed the boat at Algeciras
the watchman going about serene with his lamp." From medieval
times until nearly the end of the 19th century, many European
cities employed perambulatory night watchmen. The strange word
that Molly applies to this one makes sense in context: the
Spanish name for such a guard was sereno. Moments
earlier she has indulged a similar slide into remembered
Spanish by applying the strange term "vague" to some men
sleeping in the shade. Both words evoke realities somewhat
darker than their English analogues might suggest.
Stuart Gilbert remarks that the unusual words in these
phrases ("the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the
shade on the steps" and "the watchman going about
serene") "may strike the reader as being too 'precious',
and unlikely to be used by Molly Bloom. They are, as a matter
of fact, echoes of common Spanish words which she used to hear
at Gibraltar; vago, a vagrant, and sereno, the
watchman's cry as he goes his rounds, 'All's well––sereno!'"
(James Joyce's Ulysses, 378-79n). The cry of sereno
(calm, quiet, peaceful) became attached to the watchmen
themselves in Spain and that title is still used today, even
though watchmen no longer trudge through the streets uttering
loud cries but merely post guard––like Gumley, the "night
watchman" mentioned in Aeolus. In Eumaeus
he is nothing more than a stationary and possibly somnolent
form in a dark "sentrybox."
In the days before streetlights and alarm clocks, cities
employed men to patrol the dark streets, watching for trouble
and also calling out the time to people in their houses. In a
short 24 March 2016 web post on AHS: The Story of Time
(www.ahsoc.org), Peter de Clercq reports a detail from
Judith Flanders's The Victorian City: Everyday Life in
Dickens' London (2012): "for a small fee, a watchman
might act as a mobile alarm clock, stopping at houses along
his route, to waken anyone who needed to be up at a specific
time." He also cites the exasperation of a character in Tobias
Smollett's Humphrey Clinker (1771): "I start every
hour from my sleep, at the horrid noise of the watchmen
bawling the hour through every street, and thundering at every
door; a set of useless fellows, who serve no other purpose but
that of disturbing the repose of the inhabitants."
The "lamp" that such men carried was no doubt useful
for navigating dark lanes, spying out mischief, and preventing
attacks. Watchmen also evidently carried weapons for
self-defense should their weak circle of light prove an
insufficient deterrent to violence. In the photograph
displayed here, one of London's last night watchmen wears a
cutlass in a hanger at his hip and carries some kind of stick
in his right hand. (According to one website that displays
this photograph, www.londonpicturearchive.org.uk, he also has
a large rattle tucked beneath his sash––rather like the
bearbells that some hikers attach to their packs or poles to
let grizzlies know that they are approaching.) Thomas
Rowlandson's depiction of a late 18th century night watchman
making his rounds in London shows something greatly resembling
an Irish shillelagh in his right hand, and another of his
drawings shows a watchman being attacked by townspeople. All
three representations suggest that serenity was not the most
distinctive condition of night watchmen in European cities.
But Molly thinks of them in the midst of her rhapsodic revery
about the beauties of Gibraltar at the end of Penelope,
just after remembering the vagrants who slept on the streets
of Algeciras during the day. Unlike her husband, who displays
considerable apprehension in rough parts of town, she
seems to be relatively unfazed by gritty urban realities.
