Life through a century-old lens

HISTORY: TERENCE KILLEENreviews Dublin 1911Edited by Catriona Crowe Prism, 245pp. €20

ON CENSUS NIGHT in 1911, which fell on Sunday, April 2nd, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, wife of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, appears not to have been at home to have her name included in the census. Her absence was not coincidental. She had removed herself to a remote cottage in Co Wicklow in protest at the denial of the vote to women, part of a suffragette boycott of the census organised both in Ireland and in Britain. The name of an Emily Sheehy Skeffington is inserted on the census form, apparently later, squeezed between those of her husband and son. Both Francis and Hanna refuse to state their religion, probably as a protest against having to answer this question.

This is the kind of fascinating detail that is provided in the Irish censuses of 1901 and 1911, made available online by the National Archives of Ireland. This development has been of enormous benefit not only to researchers and scholars but also to anybody interested in their family's past or in the history of their area. It has now become far easier to do microhistory: the exploration and retrieval of the past on a very small scale, far from the captains and the kings. And, as Ireland has a major writer who dealt precisely at that micro level, it has been a particular boon for James Joyce studies, in whose works so many Dubliners who left no other footprint on the sands of time - most do not appear, for instance, in the Dictionary of Irish Biography - are to be found. (Some of the fruits of the census-based research into those Irish Joycean lives are available on the website jjon.org and in the Dublin James Joyce Journal.) Dublin 1911is an offshoot of the census project. Using the census data as a background resource, the volume provides an overview of that year in Dublin.

The book is organised by the calendar, going through the months and highlighting the major events of each. Notable occasions include the visit of King George V and Queen Mary (the last visit by a British monarch until this year), the census itself and the unveiling of the Parnell monument. The book does not have an author as such; its text consists mainly of newspaper excerpts chronicling the events of the year. There are, however, short essays describing and discussing some of the major aspects of the period, such as emigration, poverty, sport and religion. These are unattributed; the title page mentions contributions from Paul Rouse, Mark Duncan and William Murphy, so any or all of them may have been involved, along with the editor, Catriona Crowe. A clearer account of who did what would have been welcome. (It appears from the acknowledgments that the piece on the suffragettes comes from Murphy.)

Dublin 1911is about much more than text, however. It is a triumph of book production, with wonderful photographs of the period, advertisements, invitation cards, newspaper announcements and more interspersed throughout. These give a sense of immersion in the world of Dublin 1911 that is worth more than any amount of abstract discussion.

The period comes alive, with many aspects that may not be palatable to present-day Ireland but that still have to be understood and addressed. The fawning nature of the newspaper coverage of the royal visit, for instance, (not just in The Irish Times) may well be rather disconcerting, but it is very much part of the period's ambience. (And, in fairness, there are also records of opposition and protest.) The treatment of the royal visit is one clear example of a difference between the Dublin of 1911 and the Dublin of today (the treatment of this year's event, while enthusiastic, could hardly be called fawning), but equally notable are the continuities between that world and this, the connections that lie beneath the political changes and that are probably much more enduring. The approach of this book is especially valuable in highlighting such affinities. (And it is worth remembering that not everybody alive then is now dead.) In some ways, certain aspects are present in 1911 that are still at work today, only now on a much larger scale, unimaginable to the people of 100 years ago.

One of the most striking of these is sport - and its prominence in this work is another reminder that the shape of modern Ireland was in many ways set in the 1880s and that it has not moved on all that far from then. It is true that the balance of sporting power has shifted somewhat: soccer was by far the most popular sport in the Dublin of the time, while the GAA, although popular in the country, did not yet have a very large presence in the city. Nonetheless, the account of the Leinster football championship (won by Kilkenny, of all counties: some things have changed) where Kilkenny failed to turn up on time but nonetheless went ahead to win the match, despite Meath protests, has a strongly contemporary ring.

Another area that one might imagine was a nonissue in 1911, compared with now, is traffic. Yet even in 1911 the problems posed by the motor car were already a preoccupation of city planners. There was lively debate on the question of a speed limit, with many objectors pointing out that horse-drawn hackneys posed just as great a danger to the public. So even though the terms have changed the issues have not.

One of the more poignant pieces concerns a Protestant demonstration against the papal Ne Temere decree, which severely restricted the conditions for a mixed marriage. It is rather touching to see how Protestants instantly recognised the threat posed to their church, with one speaker describing the decree as "an act of intolerable aggression on the part of a foreign power" - language that is not without a certain contemporary relevance.

These are just some of the items contained in a very rich compendium that essentially brings a city to life at a certain point in its history. The photograph of the interior of a Dublin pub on page 96 (from the Guinness Archive; as the text says, such photographs are very rare) is alone worth the price. One would love to know what premises this was.

But that is just one of the very stimulating questions thrown up by this admirable volume.

Terence Killeen is research scholar at the James Joyce Centre, Dublin