The texture of Dublin would be nothing without the people who inhabit its history, from Viking traders to Dean Swift and the thousands whose names are lost, writes Neil Hegarty.
A few weeks ago, I was booked on to a flight from Dublin to Toulouse. It was one of these hellish early morning departures: at 5am, Dublin airport was fairly crackling with aggression and frustration. The flight left on time, though, and as if to make reparation for such traumas at cockcrow, I was treated to one of the best views of Dublin I have ever had. The plane banked west of the city and flew low across its length before climbing and turning its nose south in the crystalline October air; and I could see the extravagant expanse of the Phoenix Park, the Liffey and Grand Canal making their angular journeys towards the sea, the sweeping bend of the bay itself. The whole of the Irish Sea seemed set out for my benefit: the Irish coast and the Isle of Man to the north, the hills of the Lake District of England on the farthest horizon; the pincer arms of the harbour at Holyhead to the east and the peak of Snowdon beyond. A map of the world, with all roads leading back to Dublin. It lasted only a few short seconds, and then the plane turned south, and the map vanished.
A brief sight but it stayed with me, encapsulating as it did some of the facts and much of the texture of Dublin's history: the first Viking ships that nosed into Dublin Bay in the 9th century, having made their way over from the Isle of Man and beyond; the thousands of mail boats and troop ships that made the hop across from Holyhead down the years; and the ships leaving Dublin port for destinations that lay beyond my sight - New York, Boston, Sydney. Dublin's complicated relationship with itself, with the rest of Ireland, with England, and the historic ties that still bind the city to all of these seemingly disparate places - all this had been made flesh in that fleeting glimpse of the Irish Sea. The moment cut through the eddies of history, and offered instead a vision of its underlying connectedness.
History - and Irish history not least - can be a tangled and matted affair. It is no straightforward matter to unpick such threads, and a million others like them, and bring them together into a clear historical portrait of Dublin. But it's a worthwhile project, even an exhilarating one: because through understanding the connections of the past, we better understand our present society.
Take the comings and goings that characterise Dublin's history and that are a natural result of the city's coastal location. The story of Dublin is in large part the story of newcomers and immigrants, for the city has depended on waves of arrivals from overseas - and from the rest of Ireland - to nourish and sustain its development. Those first Vikings, for example, who were more than simply the bloodthirsty savages of popular lore. They settled comfortably into Dublin life, traded slaves in the city's markets, and in sharing the same space, the Irish and Vikings came under each others' influence.
These changes may be seen in everything from architecture to artisan design work. I like to imagine a burly Viking dropping into a silversmith's workshop in 11th-century Dublin. He fusses and tuts: the designs are all much too influenced by those damned Saxons across the sea. He wants something that will remind him of his Norse roots. Looming over the silversmith, then, he delivers a thundering lecture on contemporary Scandinavian design and leaves, his order placed in no uncertain terms. Viking and silversmith have changed history a little in the process: their respective traditions have fused together, perhaps briefly but effectively.
AND IT IS certainly true that after a generation or two, it had become increasingly difficult to work out who was Irish and who was Viking. Massacres may come and massacres may go, but people will work, trade, live and love together, given half a chance - and our collective gene pool in Dublin, as a result, is as mixed as it gets.
History viewed in the round also gives other stories a chance to be heard. Fast-forward 700 years, past Dublin's elongated medieval period, with its decrepit buildings, its collapsing cathedral roofs and ruinous gunpowder explosions, its plagues and devastating fires and its dissolved monasteries. This period of decay has at last been left behind; the new 18th-century city is being - patchily - created. The gravelled walks of St Stephen's Green are newly fashionable; Trinity College is being rebuilt in glorious style, its expansion underwritten by the Irish Parliament sitting across the road on College Green; and lamps are shining in the windows of the vast new townhouses on Henrietta Street. Inside one, a servant girl is on the back stairs, lugging a basin of hot water up from the kitchens. It is the end of a long day. She moves quietly, taking care not to be seen by the company gathered in the salon upstairs.
In the past, we might not have spared a thought for this servant girl. She probably left no traces behind for us to find - but it is worth pausing when appreciating the finery of Georgian Dublin to acknowledge the labour and toil undertaken behind the scenes to keep such homes sumptuous and their prosperous inhabitants lit and warm and clean. The facts that we may glean about the servants of Dublin, as much as the stucco work on the ceilings, the elegant fanlights and glossy front doors, are worthy of our attention.
Sometimes, the facts horrify. I came across an account of a 19th-century gale in Dublin that produced a massive storm surge in the waters of the Liffey, causing them to back up and flood the city centre. A female servant was caught by the floodwaters, trapped in a deep cellar below Grafton Street in the middle of the storm. She drowned in a vile mixture of river water and raw sewage.
The account did not give her name.
At other times, however, history throws us a character who ought to have been swept away and forgotten - but who refuses to go nameless into the night. One such is the 18th-century Dubliner Laetitia Pilkington, who used every tool at her disposal to chip and chisel her name into the city's history. Of middling and reasonably respectable stock, Pilkington morphed into one of these scribbling adventuresses who traditionally get a hard time from the commentators. She was motivated, as we all are, by economic concerns - her adultery and that of her ambitious husband had led to a scandalous divorce and eventually to penury. To overcome her financial difficulties, she published a three-volume memoir, using a past friendship with the great Jonathan Swift as her trump card. It worked, after a fashion - at any rate, she was no longer threatened by debtors' prison - and in the process Pilkington helped to excavate a little of the history that seldom makes its way into the light.
In one volume, for example, she describes an altercation which culminates in Dean Swift wrestling her to the ground and force-feeding her brandy and gingerbread. He then rose, brushed himself down and processed serenely to Evensong in St Patrick's Cathedral.
Given what we know of Swift, such a tale has the clear ring of authenticity; and certainly it rounds out his historical character colourfully. And in the process, Pilkington made sure she did not disappear into the weave of the city's fabric: John Banville has recently written a play narrated by the lady herself; and she is also commemorated by a plaque at St Ann's, Dawson Street. It makes up a little, perhaps, for that nameless woman who drowned alone in a cellar beneath Grafton Street.
THE HISTORY OF a city, then, is built of something more than a parade of rulers - of mayors and governors, of monarchies giving way to republics - crucial though these details are. A city is made up of lives that are lived at street level, of lives that link and intersect in every possible way, repeatedly changing the course of history as they do so. And this is the case for Dublin too: an understanding of the city is formed from picking out individual lives and stories and linking them up into a web, filled with colour and texture. This web is the real history of a place.
As EM Forster once said: Only connect. And therein lies a tale.
Dublin - A View From the Ground by Neil Hegarty is published by Portrait, €29.95