Temple Bar is now known for its nightlife, but its history is firmly rooted in the printed page
Some things never change, or at least not by much. Smock Alley Theatre, the venue in Temple Bar this week for the Dublin Book Festival, is a case in point. Originally opened in 1662 as the first custom-built theatre in Ireland, it remained active as a playhouse until its closure around 1787. The site became the church of SS Michael John in 1811, only for it to close in 1989. The building, which still contains substantial remnants of the original theatre, reopened in May this year, again as the Smock Alley Theatre.
Temple Bar, known today as Dublin’s cultural quarter, contains five theatres and numerous galleries, residences, music venues, hotels and, of course, pubs. Maybe that scene is not a whole lot different from 260 years ago when George Frideric Handel or Jonathan Swift walked its cobbled streets. Temple Bar (although the district was not branded as such then) in the 1740s was essentially the docklands of Dublin. Its streets were crammed with taverns and coffee houses, shops and chandlers, craft and manufacturing workshops, boarding houses and brothels, beggars and robbers, cock-fighting pits and gambling dens. Press gangs roamed the streets, looking for victims to crew sailing ships. The rich, the gentry and professionals lived as neighbours with actors, merchants, clerks, shopkeepers and the servant classes.
Remarkably, among all this mayhem, there were theatres, music halls, galleries and a number of printers and publishers. Printing and publishing were often one and the same enterprise and the most famous of these was on East Essex Street.
This was the firm of George Faulkner, which also had its own bookshop outlet. Faulkner (1703-1775) was the Irish publisher for the books of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. In 1725 he founded a leading newspaper of the day, the Dublin Journal, but it succumbed to competition exactly 100 years later. He also printed the word-book for Handel’s first performance of Messiah in Neal’s Music Hall, Fishamble Street, on April 13th, 1742.
In nearby Copper Alley, Andrew Cook was the king’s printer general for Ireland and the official government journal of the day, the Dublin Gazette, was re-launched in 1705 after its suppression by William of Orange at the Custom House Printing House on Essex Street. In continuous print since then, the gazette became Iris Oifigiúil, the official organ of the new Irish Government, from 1922.
In the 18th century there were around 35 booksellers in Temple Bar and a more recent memory of these were the street bookstalls placed outside their shops. These are all gone now but the tradition is somewhat kept alive by the weekend book market on Temple Bar Square.
A virtually unknown and charming graphic tribute to Irish writers, poets, playwrights, songsters, designers and other creative people is laid out along the walls amid the laneways off Fleet Street, principally along Aston Place, Bedford Lane and Price’s Lane.
The area has itself become the subject of books and literary activity. Even James Joyce dipped a couple of his characters from Ulysses on to its streets. Stephen Dedalus rummaged through the bookcarts along Bedford Row looking for one of his pawned school prizes, and Leopold Bloom makes a book purchase from a cart under Merchants’ Arch. Joyce’s friend, John F Byrne, lived in No 20 East Essex Street and has been immortalised as the character Cranley in Portrait of the Artist.
The printers and publishers, like many of the other traditional trades, have departed from these inner-city streets to be re-placed by occasional desk-top and internet publishers and the numerous booksellers have been reduced to a couple of outlets.
However, the vibrancy, relevance and history of Dublin’s cultural and historic quarter (and not just the pubs) is itself likely to be the source and inspiration of the written word for many decades to come.
PAT LIDDYwill lead literary walking tours during the Dublin Book Festival, from Smock Alley Theatre at 11am and 2pm on Saturday and Sunday. €6/ 8
