Over the course of 1,400 years of history, Dublin has undergone astonishing changes. Around the world and in Europe, there are many cities competing with each other, but almost none have become the capital of Europe.
Dublin occupies a very unique place in Irish history as well as in the Irish imagination. In His book Dublin: The City of Vicissitudes and Dynamism, David Dickson, a well-known Irish author and professor of modern history at Trinity College Dublin, brings us a vivid Dublin – eighteen centuries from its Middle Ages to the Neoclassical period. He chronicles the vastness and variability of the city in a chronicle, telling the story of the island of Ireland: it is constantly being shaped by and influencing the people who come to the city.
The following is an excerpt from Dublin: A City of Vicissitudes and Vitality, abridged from the original text. The subtitles are added by the editor and are not owned by the original text. It has been authorized by the publishing house to publish.
Dublin: A City of Vicissitudes and Vitality, by David Dixon, translated by Yu Guokuan and Gong Yongmei, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, February 2021.
Author 丨 [Love] David Dixon
Excerpt 丨An also
What frames the city of Dublin is its silent history
The Dublin poet and journalist James Stephens wrote in 1923: "No city can emerge without the same, it must be the accumulation of ancestral inheritance, and these accumulated traditions in turn profoundly affect the inhabitants of the city today." When the residents are young, the city is the old city; when the residents of the city become old, the city once again looks young, youthful and gorgeous, which is amazing. Henri Lefebvre, a more recent cultural critic, seems less optimistic: "The cities built in the past no longer exist and no one really understands them." "For most of us, the past is indeed gone, and the clues are hard to find. Dublin, which was around the time of the Celtic Tiger from 1995 to 2007, was like a youthful young man, living in the present is what people are keen to pursue.
What frames the city, however, is its silent history. Even now, its long history is an integral part of the city's business card. Never before has Dublin's history been so packaged and commercialized. Cute tour guides make a fuss about "wonderful old times", more sophisticated cultural merchants will awaken joyce's Leopold Bloom world to attract tourists, and the city government organizes a number of city history celebrations to promote its material and intangible "cultural heritage".
But what exactly is the city made of? Is Dublin just a municipal area? In that case, many areas that have been fully urbanized since the mid-19th century are excluded, not to mention other areas of urbanization in the 20th century. For now, from Malahideshire north of Dublin to Bray in Wicklowshire, west to Leixlip in Kildareshire, does Dublin refer to all of these urbanized areas?
Politically speaking, this "city" of more than a million people is internally self-contained, and currently has a total of six county councils. And if you look at the city and the surrounding commuting areas, there is a bigger Dublin; people come and go, work, study, and play every day.
Painted in 1791. View of Marlton from the opposite side of the Essex Bridge, along Parliament Street. Illustration of Dublin: A City of Vicissitudes and Vitality
The identification of old Dubliners involves something completely different – not about where Dublin is, but about what Dublin is. The city has been labeled with many labels, Viking, Norman, English, Protestant, King George, Nationalist and Republican. These labels are almost all oversimplified. There is no doubt that Dublin has been the largest urbanized area on this deeply disputed island since the emergence of towns west of the Irish Sea. For seven centuries, it was the epicenter of the spread of British influence and the main channel for the Britishization of the surrounding peoples for most of that period. But for the various forces opposing Britain, it was a refuge for them to breathe.
So, at different times, Dublin was a colonist's fortress and a place of strife. There are also many strifeed cities in Europe and the Mediterranean, some of which experience more brutal encounters than Dublin (prague, Königsberg/Kaliningrad, Smyrna/Izmir and Algiers). Unlike many cities in Britain and Western Europe, Dublin almost completely escaped the devastating effects of the wars sparked by the Industrial Revolution of the 20th century. But the hiatus and setbacks that have taken place in Dublin's history are more serious than any other European capital – as evidenced by history. But one thing, like all metropolises, Dublin has a cultural fusion. While cultural differences can sometimes lead to contradictions and conflicts, this convergence gives the history of the city a creative character.
In 1922, Joyce made the city widely known
Dublin is known for its extreme class and wealth, where Napoleonic luxury coexists with inexplicable poverty. In this regard, the reasons are equally complex. Dublin is ireland's national centre of social and economic innovation, but whenever change occurs, it becomes a battleground for economic interests, and the advantage of having a big city and being able to work in the city is the cause of poverty. A century ago, the world's largest brewery offered its employees considerable benefits; at that time, the housing problems of the city's working class were an internationally known scandal; and the problem of alcoholism among the locals was already a widespread phenomenon.
During the years of century turmoil from 1916 to 1922, the ideological confusion and inconsistencies were unprecedented. The Easter Rising of April 1916 was like a thunderbolt in the sky, and the devastated city was once again in a state of panic. The uprising did not initially receive much support; but in less than a year, public opinion began to turn, and many citizens turned to support radical separatist movements.
Less than three years later, sinn Féin, which advocated division, convened a national convention (the first Irish Parliament) in the annex of the mayor's residence. The guerrilla warfare that followed throughout the countryside and the corresponding resistance of the British army, although most of it took place outside Dublin, had its roots in the city, regardless of its intensity. Most of the political wrangling over the Anglo-Irish Armistice or Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 took place mainly in Dublin.
The square courtyard of Dr. Stevens Hospital. Opened in 1733 with 87 beds, the hospital was the largest medical hospital in Dublin in the 18th century. Illustration of Dublin: A City of Vicissitudes and Vitality
Then, in January 1922, it was time to hand over Dublin Fort. The castle is a symbol of British rule over Ireland since the 12th century. From the 12th to the 20th century, Dublin's fate was mixed with British rule. So, at this time in 1922, when the city first became the capital of 'Ireland for the Irish', was she able to recreate itself? Five months after the formal transition of power, civil war broke out. The first clashes were short but intense, with the bombing of the Four Courts Building at the Irish Public Archives off the docks of Dublin destroyed. The 700-year-old British Central Archives in Ireland was destroyed in a matter of hours.
The year 1922 also saw the birth of a unique literary work. James Joyce spent seven years writing "Little Stories of the Day" (referring to Joyce's Ulysses book). The novel is set in Pre-World War I Dublin, but echoes homer's Odyssey. The book was published in Paris. Dublin natives' attitudes toward the book were unclear, even opposed, and its international influence was slow to open the situation. But long before the end of the 20th century, Ulysses had become one of the most well-known models of modernist works. It is conceivable that this year in Dublin's history has thus become a well-known moment for every researcher of contemporary English literature, and Dublin has become a distinctive corner of the world's cultural gardens. It was the year Joyce made the city known, but it was also the year that a fire in the public archives destroyed potential resources for exploring the city's deep history. It's an ironic thing.
Academic research on Dublin's history has yielded little success
There were two projects at the time that aimed to excavate dublin's history. The first was the publication of the Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, which began as early as 1889, and the last volume, volume 19, was published in 1944. Edited by Sir John Gilbert and his widow, the book is a review of a collection of official decrees issued by the city administration before the reorganization of the government from 1447 to 1840. These precious materials, along with other important municipal archives, were not affected by the fire in the public archives; this set of books recorded the city's deep and intricate history, and it was not easy to get the approval of the nationalist local governments of the time and publish them in its entirety.
Gilbert wrote an innovative book on the history of Dublin's urban development in the 1850s. He devoted his life to the collection, collation, preservation and publication of archives. He was a leading initiator of the professional protection of urban archives and the construction of public archives in Ireland. Another "fin de régime" project is entirely unofficial – the Irish Georgian Society, founded in 1908 as an amateur organisation with a predominantly unified political leaning, whose public mission is to collate and publish the history of Dublin's architecture and decoration, the architectural history of the long "classical" period of the 18th century. By 1922, five volumes had been published, including detailed pictures and transcripts of many buildings and archives destroyed during the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Civil War of 1922. By this time, the original intention of the mission had been unconsciously abandoned.
A panorama by Joseph Tudor in 1752 stretches from Berg's library complex to the barren Linsend Peninsula and busy Dublin Bay. Illustration of Dublin: A City of Vicissitudes and Vitality
After these events, academic research into Dublin's history had little effect. In fact, in many ways, the integration of the old capital into New Ireland was difficult. Its particular British history makes it impossible for it to easily adapt to the nationalist-dominated environment. For the new regime, the building of civic morality is completely out of the agenda. Neither the national cultural institutions located in the city nor the local government, the Dublin City Hall, have the resources and vision to support and develop the conservation and research of Dublin's cultural heritage. A city museum, run by individual enthusiasts, opened in 1944 and has been operating in a low profile. The Rijksmuseum's approach to Dublin history (at least until the 1990s) was limited to celebrating the Easter Rising.
Founded in 1934, the Old Dublin Society has been the amateur of the Society for decades to show dublin's past to everyone and make people known. Occasionally, they give speeches calling for their protection. In retrospect, we see Maurice Craig's book Dublin: A social and architectural history, published in 1952, which was the beginning of a rigorous academic study of Dublin history. The book's narration of Dublin's two-hundred-year-old natural history is beautiful and delicately described, not only with a superb academic level throughout, but also with a thorough, profound and penetrating process of reasoning. Craig believes that the "Restored City" protected by the Earl of Ormond is a replica of the capital city of the "King George" period. Its heyday was in the late 18th century, when the social and political spheres were fully controlled by the Protestant ruling class, and by 1801 the Anglo-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Union had largely lost its relevance.
Craig's research is valuable, a reprint. In the last three decades, many books on the history of Dublin have also been published, in considerable quantities, unprecedented in number, some of which can be collected, and others of which are popular reading materials for the general reader. Then there was a protracted public debate throughout the 1970s: between Wood Quay and Christ Church Cathedral, Viking Age treasures were discovered. There was great public interest in this small medieval town. Thanks to an archaeological research project that has been ongoing and a series of monographs have been published under the title Of Medieval Dublin, the site has been preserved through this wind. Whether in archaeology, architecture or documentation, the level of research after the Middle Ages, although uneven, is rich in writing.
Since the 1988 Dublin Millennium Celebration, more research, reflection and writing have been done on the city's history than in the previous millennium. It's comforting to think about that.
A james joyce contemporary wrote in 1902: "Dublin is a big village, a dirty village, and rumors are the supreme ruler here." Almost a century later, an insightful foreigner summed up the characteristics of Dublin: "The inhabitants of the community are closely related, which is rare in a city of this size, people gather to talk about the world, and there is no shortage of people at all levels who are skillful and resourceful..." Joyce captured this kind of urban conversation in Dubliners and Ulysses. Since then, many writing masters have successfully tried this. Historical documents rarely capture the power of spoken language, and physical handmade artworks are completely unable to. The audiovisual information about modern Dublin is now extremely rich, but from the perspective that historians can adopt, it is not long enough to say, and the content is too complicated. Therefore, written history can only be based on documents, historical pictures, architecture, archaeology, and material culture.
My goal here is to try to understand the past, not to recreate it. But on the big stage of history, some actors have squeezed their peers into the shadows, because the capable, wealthy adult males dominated all forms of historical records before the 20th century, which is inevitably reflected in any regular historical analysis. Taking a step back, if my purpose here is to understand the evolutionary history of Dublin, the focus should remain particularly focused on the truly influential people. The voices of the little people, even in the 20th century, were heard—the prisoners, the uninhabited sick, and the bullied, abused—who remained silent in the annals of history because they had no way to do anything about their fate and no influence over the development of the city. Only extraordinary events, natural disasters, explosions and vicious crime constitute the miscellaneous histories of Dubliners, which can only be hidden by normal history; where possible, such supporting characters who can tell the truth of the problem will be used well.
Editor 丨 Zhang Jin
Introduction Proofreading 丨 Zhao Lin