An Irishman’s Diary: James Joyce and Dublin by Lamplight

In James Joyce's short story, Clay, the central character Maria works for a laundry called Dublin by Lamplight, a job she has grown to enjoy, despite early misgivings.

The misgivings related not to the nature of the institution, hinted at in its poetic name. The real-life Dublin by Lamplight was a charity “for penitent females”, whose past lives had typically involved a lot of night work, on streets. But the only hint of that in the story is when the protagonist refers to one of the inmates as “having the notions of a common woman”.

Being a devout Catholic, Maria had been more concerned about her employers: “She used to have such a bad opinion of Protestants but now she thought they were very nice people, a little quiet and serious but still very nice to live with.” The only things that continued to bother her about their laundry, Joyce tells us, were the “tracts on the walls”.

In any case, the story’s main event happens elsewhere, during a Halloween night visit to the family of Joe, a friend she used to look after when he was a child. Now Joe’s children are playing Halloween games, including one in which Maria is blindfold and has to pick from a number of saucers each containing something that foretells a person’s fate in the next 12 months.

But when her fingers fall on a “soft, wet substance” (un-named except in the story title), there is embarrassed silence, then muttered admonishment by the children’s mother, and a hasty rearrangement of saucers, after which the heroine is asked to choose again.

This time she picks a prayer book, which everyone agrees means she will enter a convent within the year. It is left to a tearful Joe, getting drunk, to have the epiphany that all Joyce’s stories involve.

We don't know what happened afterwards to Maria, now forever frozen in time, like all the characters of the short story collection, Dubliners. We do know the laundry did not survive long after 1914, when Joyce's stories were published.

Founded nearly 60 years before, it had faced previous financial crises such as one in 1876, when the Dublin Evening Mail reported it to be struggling "from the unusually large number of fallen women who have of late sought its shelter". But it was the first World War – and, presumably, the loss of so many customers for clean shirts – that finally did for it.

By the end of 1915, The Irish Times reported the charity's finances to be under "strain". And in February 1917, the trustees sought a winding-up order, citing "competition" and "the war", as well as reduced donations. At an auction that month, the laundry sold all its assets, including "quantities of copper", an "antique cabinet and bookshelf", and "seventy beds".

Dublin by Lamplight was based in Ballsbridge, on the Dodder, whose torrents, as mentioned in this column yesterday have supported many water-intensive industries down the centuries. So the fatal competition, circa 1914, must have included another famous cleaning business, founded in the same suburb just two years earlier.

Swastika Laundry

The Swastika Laundry, which took its name from an ancient Eastern symbol for good luck, went on to survive the 1914-18 conflict. It continued through the 1920s and 1930s, when events in

Europe

must have called into question the wisdom of its branding. More remarkably, the name also survived the second World War, and decades afterwards, before the business was bought out.

By then, it had left at least one notable footnote in literary history. The event may even have amounted to an epiphany, Joycean-style, although the writer was a German, Heinrich Böll. It was 1954 and he had just arrived in Dublin where his first impressions included seeing shop signs with names previously known only from books – “Joyce and Yeats, McCarthy and Molloy”. But what nearly made a deeper impression, by his own account, was a Swastika Laundry van.

He was “almost run over” by one while crossing the road near what is now Heuston Station, during a vain attempt to change German money.  And for a former army conscript, wounded several times in the war, death by Swastika van in peaceful Dublin would have added irony to misfortune.

Instead, happily for both literature and tourism, Böll. survived. Still without local currency, laundered or otherwise, he and his family travelled to Westport on credit. It was the start of an idyll he eventually turned into Irish Journal, which would be a German bestseller for decades afterwards.