I’m a big fan of books on Dublin from decades gone by, in particular guide books or studies written by ‘outsiders’. John Harvey’s Dublin: A Study In Environment (1949) was begging me to buy it when I spotted it sitting in Chapters second hand section, and I couldn’t resist. The book comes with the endorsement of Bernard Shaw who writes “I wish it had been available when I was a youth in Dublin. To me it is intensely interesting.”
Harvey begins his work by noting that:
“Dublin is still a city almost unknown to English people, and the loss is ours. Between the mountains and the sea, it is one of the most fortunate of European capitals, and it has the enormous advantage of consisting mainly of buildings produced at the peak of its historic culture.”
The book contains many fantastic images of the city, showing Dubliners at work as well as some fantastic buildings of the period, such as The Irish House pub at Wood Quay which is no longer with us.
Bank of Ireland, College Green.
The Irish House.
Harvey doesn’t shy away from sharing opinions among historical facts and information on sites of interest in Dublin. “Nationalism is nonsense; but it can have indirect results which do make sense” he writes, as “so far as Dublin is now both a flourishing and a promising city, it is the outcome of nationalism, building on the remains of an alien aristocratic regime.” Harvey doesn’t shy away from attacking Irish nationalists on occasion, for example taking aim at the “political hooligans” who destroyed John Van Nost’s statue of George II inside St. Stephen’s Green.
Ireland, Harvey noted, suffered from an “extremely thin-skinned moral censorship”, a censorship “so wide that the banning of books and cutting of films reaches a humorously fantastic point.”
Harvey is completely correct in his commentary on Dublin’s ancient cathedrals, noting that they were both “…subjected to the horrors of well-meant ‘restoration’, which as usual destroyed the greater part of their original character and beauty. Both buildings were in a very dilapidated state, and urgently needed repair, but the work actually done was so extensive as to be even more disastrous than contemporary work at English churches.”
Harvey writes of what he sees as the perception of the British people in Ireland, a rather damning indictment that “‘The British’ in many an Irish mouth has implications only equaled by those of les boches in France; it is one of the few sad instances where the Irish sense of humour is lost.”
Mass goers.
Refreshingly for such a study, the tenement poverty of the inner-city features, which Harvey stressing that “except for O’Connell Street and Parnell Street, practically the whole of the northern half of the eighteenth-century city is one enormous slum.”
Harvey’s book is an enjoyable read, loaded with opinion on not only Dublin and Dubliners but also the political questions of the day, and the relationship between Ireland and Britain. Batsford, its publishers, produced a series on “British Cities” in the style of Harvey’s effort, and all contained the same style of maps and in excess of 100 images.
“To an Englishman Dublin has the virtues of a foreign capital without the drawbacks: artificial animosities have not annulled the kinship which has grown up through centuries of intermarriage between the people’s of the British Isles. Dublin seems to foreshadow the qualities of a new type of supra-national city; let us have a look at her.”
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