(Bates) Boarding house to Residential

In his book Dubliners, James Joyce used specific locations around Dublin for his setting. In the story “The Boarding House,” he places Mrs. Mooney and her children in a boarding house on Hardwicke Street. While he gives little actual description of the house itself, it is not difficult to imagine the neighborhood’s atmosphere. Joyce describes her tenants as “a floating population of tourists from Liverpool and the Isle of Man, and occasionally, artistes from the music hall.” He later says, “Mrs. Mooney’s young men paid fifteen shillings a week for board and lodgings (beer and stout at dinner excluded).” Such a group of tourists and young men suggests a boisterous, fast-paced neighborhood, and Joyce’s choice to include the information about beer and stout in parentheses indicates that much drinking goes on within the boarding house. Couple this with the probability that Mrs. Mooney did not have much money to buy the boarding house after she and her husband separated, and the reader might expect a rather shabby, low-class neighborhood.

However, the famous address at Hardwicke Street in the present day is far different from the above

description. The boarding house’s black door is 

polished and painted and framed by white paneling. The brick townhouses appear nicely kept, and rows of cars line the parking lot. Trees grow in neat lines along the sidewalk in an urban fashion, adding a bit of green to soften the red of the bricks.

As I walked down the street, one window in particular caught my eye, for it had the pink ribbon for breast cancer stuck to its glass. This simple sign made me wonder about its residents, who they were and what had inspired them to display the emblem. It added a touch of the personal, making the neighborhood seem more like a home rather than the rowdiness Joyce’s descriptions of the boarding house incited. It would seem that the Hardwicke Street neighborhood has grown more refined in the last century.