DURING the summer of 1853, Charles Dickens sent a writer for his magazine Household Wordsto Dublin.
The weekly journal had been set up by Dickens in 1850, and it attracted many young writers keen to bask in the glow of Dickens's unparalleled fame.
All contributions to the journal were anonymous, save those written by Dickens himself, which gave the distinct impression that Dickens was solely responsible for the entire content.
The journalist dispatched to write about Dublin was George Augustus Sala, who had begun to contribute to Household Wordsin 1851. He had enclosed a letter to Dickens with his first contribution, reminding the novelist that "he had known me as a boy, and that he had been very kind to me and mine". Sala's mother was an actress who, years before, had played roles in two of Dickens's theatrical productions.
Dickens rated Sala's work highly, writing to the journal's tireless assistant editor, W.H. Wills, that "there is nobody about us whom we can use, in his way, more advantageously than this young man". Historian Jim Cooke has published an extremely useful anthology of articles written and edited by Dickens, entitled Charles Dickens's Ireland; included are Sala's writings about Dublin.
When Sala first arrived in Dublin, he was struck by its unexpected beauty. In the August 20th, 1853 issue of Household Words, he called it a "magnificent city in the midst of some of the most beautiful scenery in the world". He praised the prettiness of the River Liffey, and the elegance of the city's public buildings, but was astounded not to find the poverty and violence he had been led to expect from the Irish, a view that had been fuelled by popular representations of the nation by English writers and journalists.
With astonishment, he noted that one "may sojourn in Dublin for days without seeing a drunken man". But Sala's pristine view of Dublin was to be dramatically overturned in his next contribution to the magazine, entitled "An Irish Stew" and published in the August 27th issue. Dickens had written a fortnight earlier to W.H. Wills asking him to replace another writer's substandard article with Sala's piece: "Take out Penny News and get in the Coombe with this brilliant name: 'An Irish Stew'," he urged.
"I have found them!" Sala's article exclaimed. He had discovered the very "rags, the bones, the sawdust and the dirt" that had eluded him previously - in the Coombe. By the mid-19th century, this part of Dublin's Liberties, to the south-west of the city centre, was one of the poorest in the city, and its "labyrinth of dirty streets", as Sala described it, contained a crowded jumble of rotting tenement housing and small industrial buildings. Its inhabitants suffered a disproportionate incidence of disease brought on by the unsanitary conditions in which they lived.
Sala had wandered into the Coombe while walking from Dublin Castle, and happened upon a fight between two local fishwomen that concluded with one complaining of having being called by the other "a murthering ould excommunicated gaseometer". His interest piqued by this turbulent scene, Sala continued to explore the surrounding streets.
His taste for the colourful underside of urban life was undoubtedly sated by the discovery of the Coombe. He described it as "a very long, straggling estuary between houses (I cannot call it a street) running from the bottom of Francis Street to Ardee Street and Pimlico, and possessing vomitoria seemingly innumerable, in the shape of lanes, back streets, courts and blind alleys with an almost indescribable aspect of dirt and confusion, semi-continental picturesqueness, shabbiness less the shabbiness of dirt than that of untidiness, over-population, and frowsiness generally, perfectly original and peculiarly its own".
Finding a second-hand clothes shop seemingly stuffed to bursting with cast-off garments, Sala surmised that "every imaginable article of male and female attire seems clustered together in this shop" and that if one viewed the shop's contents "you may see yourself retrospectively in a mirror of rags", which ranged from children's school clothes through to "your schoolmaster's grey duffel dressing-gown" and a staggering array of shoes.
The reason for such an accumulation of used clothing was, Sala judged, that "the extraordinary exodus, which every year takes tens of thousands of Irishmen from their native shores (principally to America) creates an enormous demand for second-hand wearing apparel". In America clothes were "among the very dearest articles of supply" and thus out of reach of the poorest emigrant, so they stocked up on used garments in Dublin before sailing.
At the conclusion of his walk, Sala left the Coombe and headed up Patrick Street, which, he noted, was lined on one side with old clothes markets, and on the other with stalls selling meat and provisions. He then turned right at Bull Alley, finding that now broad and tree-lined street to be "a very narrow and filthy little bulk-headed avenue of butchers' stalls". Sala's revulsion at Bull Alley's almighty stench, with puddles of blood gathered among its paving stones, propelled him towards what appeared to him as the fading glory of St Patrick's Cathedral.
Years later, on a trip to San Francisco's Chinatown in 1880, Sala's nostrils must still have twitched alarmingly at the memory of this whiff. He wrote that "the very worst parts of China Town do not smell worse than do the Rue Mouffetard and the Montaigne St Genevive in Paris, than the Ghetto in Rome, or the 'Coomb' in Dublin".