Taking Liberties with the dead: where life and death imitate art

In centuries past, the part of Dublin just west of Christchurch Cathedral was known colloquially as “Hell”. The nickname may have derived from a particular tavern of ill repute, which had a sign of the devil over the door, or may have referred to the area’s general popularity among sinners.

In any case, it was infamous enough that students of Trinity College were once banned from the precincts. And it earned at least a footnote in literature, via Robbie Burns's poem Death and Doctor Hornbrook, the truth of whose events he vouches for as follows: "But this that I am gaun to tell/Which lately on a night befell/is just as true as the de[v] il's in hell/Or Dublin city."

In a later era, however, that part of the Liberties also seems to have had a reputation for miraculous resurrections from the dead, at least one of which is immortalised in a much more famous work of fiction.

Mooching through The Irish Times archive recently, I found an amusing court case from 1904, concerning one Mary O’Neill from Cook Street, which then as now runs parallel to but below the doubly-well-named High Street, with its conglomeration of churches, including the cathedral.

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O’Neill had been charged with fraudulently collecting life assurance on the policy of her aunt, Bridget Connell. It was for a mere £8: not much even then, and probably designed only to cover funeral expenses.

Locals had known for a while that Mrs Connell was in failing health. So when O’Neill went to the doctor one day to report the end of her aunt’s struggles, he obligingly gave her a death certificate, without further inquiry, on foot of which the insurance company paid out.

The scam might have worked had everyone involved laid low. And Mrs Connell, at least, did her best. She said in evidence that her niece had placed “a candle” at the head of her bed that morning and gone out, telling her to “stay quiet” and keep her eyes closed.

She further claimed not to have known what was afoot until hearing later that the same niece “was in a cab driving about High Street in company with some other people” (laughter in court). But later again, a wake had been held, with alcohol and dancing, and this time the corpse was a participant, agreeing with counsel that she had drunk “a sup”.

As for O’Neill, her defence was that the whole thing was an innocent misunderstanding. She had left her aunt “dead from seven o clock” that morning, and it wasn’t until another local woman “went to wash her” that the departed “woke up” (more laughter) and “we all got a great fright”.

If you think this story sounds similar to a certain old Dublin ballad, you’re right. The prosecuting lawyer thought that too. “Tim Finnegan’s wake was not in it with this one,” he commented.

Nor did the similarities with Finnegan’s Wake (the apostrophised one) end with the plot. As pub singers among you will know, the builder of the song “lived in Watling Street”. Which is a only a few minutes walk from Cook Street, heading farther west.

James Joyce would have been long familiar with the ballad, which had been around since the mid-19th century. And its plot of a man brought back from the dead by an accidental infusion of whiskey in time gave him the motif for his last, sprawling masterwork.

Set in a dreamworld and concerning the endless cycle of death and rebirth, Finnegans Wake was written in a style that did to words what scientists of the time – the 1920s and 1930s – were trying to do to atoms: breaking them into smaller parts and recombining them to powerful effect, explosive or otherwise.

To this end, the tale of Tim Finnegan offered the added advantage of a surname that was the linguistic equivalent of Schrödinger’s Cat. It contained the syllables “fin”, which means “end” in Latin and its derivative languages and “egan”, which sounds like a demand for an encore. And of course by dropping the apostrophe, Joyce also turned Finnegans Wake into a statement: commanding Finnegans everywhere to rise from the dead.

Even if she too had inspired a ballad, Bridget Connell would not have offered such creative possibilities. Still, the timing of her passing and resurrection is intriguing. The court case was reported two months before the day that Joyce commemorated in his other sprawling masterpiece: the one written in more-or-less conventional English and set mostly among the living, in the rich pageant that was Dublin 1904.