Guts and garters: A Joycean treasure hunt and an infamous murder

You don't need to have read Ulysses, or even pretend to have read it, to enjoy a new exhibition at the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI). The show takes the form of a treasure hunt, with 18 nuggets of information about the book – one for each chapter – distributed around the building.

No specialist knowledge is required. Even primary-school children may have fun tracking the pieces down. In which case, a lack of appreciation of the finer detail of Joyce’s masterpiece could be a distinct advantage.

If, for example, your 10-year-old finds exhibit number 13 – representing the book’s Nausicaa episode and featuring Gertie McDowell’s garters set against a picture of fireworks on Sandymount Strand – you might want to move swiftly on to number 14 rather than dwell on explanations.

The exhibits are all obvious when you find them, too: most are set in formal wood and glass cases, deliberately reminiscent of the Natural History Museum.

Theatrical night out – with the Treaty debates providing the drama

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Bog beacon - on one of Ireland’s more unusual lighthouses

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‘Covid got to him before I did. By the time I found out, it was too late to attend the funeral’

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Musical Mystery Tour - Landfried (contd), and the origins of The Ould Triangle

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But they are sufficiently well scattered for the search to double as an exploration of MoLI's hidden depths. I had the benefit on opening night of a guided tour from the woman who created the exhibition, Suzanne Freeman, and yet she didn't know where some of them had ended up either.

If you have read the book, however, you will better appreciate the extraordinary lengths to which Freeman went in assembling her trove, which took two years and involved trawling not just Joyce's text but a wide range of other resources, including eBay, at great expense.

Her finds include a vintage moustache cup, like the one owned by Leopold Bloom (Calypso episode). Moustache cups were a bit like the safe drinking mugs we now give toddlers, except they were designed to prevent contact between hot tea and an Edwardian gentlemen's whiskers.

Freeman also tracked down an expensive original copy of Sandow’s Strength and How to Obtain it, mentioned in the Ithaca chapter when, after another night of dissipation, Bloom resolves to get himself in better shape.

Elsewhere there are authentic 1904 stamps and postcards, including an original version of the card handed around by a drunken sailor in the Cabman’s Shelter (Eumaeus).

On the other hand, treasure hunters will be relieved to hear that the Glasnevin Cemetery rat, dominant feature of exhibit number six (Hades), is a mock-up.

So too are an accessory that Freeman, with typical attention to the minutiae, also included: rat droppings.

There is no escaping Ulysses in Dublin. A day after the MoLI launch, by chance, I also happened to be doing a tour of Dublin Port. This was a mostly Joyce-free zone, I thought, until spotting a mention in one of the guidebooks of the "Eumaeus chapter of Ulysses".

The context was a notorious 1908 event in Dublin: the Fish Street murder. Although that post-dated the happenings described in Ulysses, the guidebook claimed that court reports of it had inspired much of the material used by Joyce in the Eumaeus “knife conversation”.

The notoriety of the case lingered and explains why Dublin no longer has a Fish Street

Knives do indeed haunt the Cabman’s Shelter scene, partly via the nickname of James “Skin the Goat” Fitzharris, supposed manager of the premises, and partly because of Fitzharris’s notoriety a generation earlier as cab driver for the Phoenix Park murders, which infamously involved surgical equipment.

And sure enough, a knife is part of Freeman’s exhibit, her best approximation of the one shown by a sailor boasting of the things he has witnessed abroad: “And I seen a man killed in Trieste by an Italian chap. Knife in his back. Knife like that.”

Later in the chapter, someone agrees that Latin types are well known for such behaviour: “That’s why they thought the park murders […] were done by foreigners on account of them using knives.”

But the Fish Street murder was of a Dublin woman, Mary Carroll, and it was a Scottish sailor who was charged.

Unwisely, he relied in part on the Cabman’s Shelter defence.

When the likely weapon – a knife he had bought in Spain – was studied under a microscope and found to have recent blood stains, his lawyers tried to argue that Spaniards were inclined to use blades as quickly as "Irishmen used their fists". It didn't work. The Scot was sentenced to hang, although it was commuted to life imprisonment, and he got out early in the end.

The notoriety of the case lingered, meanwhile, and explains why Dublin no longer has a Fish Street. The thoroughfare still exists but when a tea merchant set up business there, he worried about its reputation. Placing enough of his workers in local cottages to swing a plebiscite, he had it officially renamed. Today it is Castleforbes Road.