Abstract
14 Henrietta Street opened as a social history museum of Dublin life in 2018. It has quickly become a popular and award-winning tourist attraction while remaining embedded in its local community. It tells the story of a Dublin house through the generations from its origins as an elite eighteenth-century townhouse through to its status as one of the most notorious tenements in early twentieth-century Dublin. It does all this superbly thanks to the excellent research underpinning the exhibits and guided tours. This research and much more besides is the basis for the two books under review here by Melanie Hayes and Timothy Murtagh. Commissioned by Dublin City Council they are beautifully produced with superb illustrations and specially commissioned architectural drawings, but they are also works of rigorous scholarship which illuminate both the history of Henrietta Street and the wider contexts of its eighteenth and nineteenth century history.
Melanie Hayes is an architectural historian and her The Best Address in Town reflects this training in her careful delineation of the form and function of the Henrietta Street houses. Her book takes a biographical approach to the street and its residents beginning with Luke Gardiner's plans and ambitions for a new residential street in the early 1730s. The reader then tours the street through the personalities of its original occupants beginning with Archbishop Boulter whose house at the top of the street (since replaced by the King's Inns Library) gave the new development the prestige and gravitas to attract further elite purchasers and builders. Boulter's house also gave the street its alternate eighteenth century name, Primate's Hill. This was as Murtagh incredulously tells us the name proposed by Dublin Corporation after Irish independence as a possible replacement for the eponymous Henrietta as part of an abandoned scheme to remove all refences to royals and lord lieutenants and their wives (like Henrietta Duchess of Bolton) from the Dublin streetscape. Boulter was followed to Henrietta Street by Gardiner himself, his protege Nathaniel Clements as well as the politicians and courtiers Henry Boyle, John Ponsonby, Gustavus Hume and the Earl of Thomond. Hayes skilfully interweaves their political and social lives with accounts of their architectural patronage and connections to create informative vignettes which do much to draw out their personalities and their connections as well as their intentions for their Dublin townhouses. Boyle emerges as more sophisticated than his usual characterisation as a bluff country squire, while Gustavus Hume's early patronage of the architect Richard Castle on both his Lough Erne estate and Henrietta Street is demonstrated conclusively adding significantly to our understanding of this key figure in Irish architectural history.
Projecting the grand figure was important in the eighteenth century but so too was sociability and Hayes demonstrates the close kinship and shared interests that bound together the male and female elite residents of the street. Her portrait of this slice of the Dublin beau monde bears comparison with work by Hannah Greig and Amanda Vickery on contemporary London. The bonds of sociability could also break down as they did in the 1750s when Boyle, Clements, Ponsonby and Archbishop Stone (who then occupied Boulter's house) found themselves at loggerheads during the Money Bill dispute. Tensions in College Green extended to the domestic scene with rival groupings drinking and toasting in neighbouring houses.
Hayes’ collective portrait of the Dublin Georgian elite reveals much about their lives and preoccupations. It also tells us something about their tastes and their all-important need to keep up appearances. Critical here was the occasional economising on building materials. The austere facades of the Henrietta Street inaugurated a Dublin Georgian style which privileged sumptuous interiors over richly ornamented exterior decoration. Appearances here could however deceive. Lord Thomond amassed fine furnishings for 5–6 Henrietta Street and used Portland stone and marble for his floors, but as Hayes notes many of the materials employed inside by the very wealthy peer ‘from painted deal panelling made to look like stone or plain white lime plaster … used in the elaborate stucco schemes’ were ‘cheap solutions’. The aim was to give the illusion of grandeur in an age of ‘self-fashioning and self-presentation’ (Hayes, pp. 106–7).
Such illusions of grandeur were also preserved by rendering the servants invisible. They were relegated to the garrets and the back stairs and are largely absent from Hayes’ account of the street's residents. There are however some occasional illuminating vignettes such as an account of Gardiner's servants sleeping on a trestle bed overlooked by a row of bayonets hanging on the hall wall to prevent intruders from coming in. This and a tantalising reference to a 1755 robbery of a neighbouring house remind us that while Amanda Vickery's innovative and inventive spatial descriptions of London's townhouses using the Old Bailey Online records remain out of reach for Irish scholars, glimpses behind closed doors and below stairs are still possible. Timothy Murtagh in the eighteenth-century prologue to his largely nineteenth-century focused book, for instance, draws on Mary Wollstonecraft's account of her brief stint as a nanny to Lord Kingsborough's family to highlight the experience of admittedly an exceptional and well-paid domestic staff member.
The Best Address in Town nevertheless portrays the richest portrait yet of an elite eighteenth century community complete with all their foibles and fashions. It does much to aid our understanding of the relationship between builder and client as well as the differences between the aspirations and reality of genteel life in Dublin. In its finely textured and deeply researched account of the buildings and builders of Henrietta Street it also offers a model for future scholars to better understand the still somewhat opaque life of the city's beau monde during the parliamentary season. Future work might map out the spatial distribution of MPs and peers in the city and the service economy that sprang up to provide for their needs. In doing so, it could build on Hayes’ investigation to show just how the city's urban development and consumption patterns were shaped by the denizens of Primate's Hill and their ilk.
Murtagh's Spectral Mansions begins in the eighteenth century and gives an overlapping but complementary account of the late eighteenth century context of Henrietta Street. His account is much more informed by a social history approach and from the outset he uses a broader lens to set the street in the wider context of Dublin's development using a nuanced reading of James Malton's and Hugh Douglas Hamilton's well-known prints to telling effect. The trauma of the 1798 rebellion and its impact on Henrietta Street – two elite residents, Lords Mountjoy and O’Neill, were killed in action in counties Wexford and Antrim respectively – is described before the analysis shifts to the post-union period. Murtagh follows the general tenor of most modern scholarship arguing for the gradual decline of Dublin's economy post Union with the end of the Napoleonic wars and the subsequent agricultural downturn the real accelerant. The changing social structure of the city and perceived need to address the ‘misery’ of the poor through institutionalisation is charted through an account of the institutions that sprang up on the north-west side of the city, the Hardwicke Fever Hospital, The Bedford Asylum for Children, the Richmond Surgical Hospital, the Richmond Asylum, the Whitworth Chronic Hospital and the Richmond Penitentiary between 1803 and 1820. Henrietta Street saw a different sort of institutional change, with the building of the King's Inns whose monumental arch closed off the top end of the street. It and the neighbouring Registry of Deeds made the street attractive to the legal community and ambitious plans were even drawn up to erect a series of legal chambers beyond the King's Inns in the manner of the London legal districts. These came to nought but one local legal entrepreneur, Tristram Kennedy, purchased a number of the Henrietta Street houses and established legal chambers and a short-lived legal academy. This ‘legal enclave’ also for a time housed the encumbered estates court at number 14 becoming a key site in the reshaping of Irish property relations in the post-famine period (Murtagh, p. 47). Neighbouring residences meanwhile housed the Geological Survey and the Census Commissioners as official ‘improving’ Dublin took over the residences of the former landed elite.
The middle-class professionals, lawyers and clerks were however gradually supplanted by new residents. In the 1860s following the Departure of the Encumbered Estates Court the Dublin Militia along with their families took up residence in 14 Henrietta Street, gradually changing the social character of the street much to the chagrin of the King's Inns benchers who eventually had them moved on to a new depot in the mid-1870s. The departure of the militia and the subsequent death of Tristram Kennedy led to the sale of a number of the large houses on the street to developers including Joseph Meade and Thomas Vance who then sub-divided the houses into tenements. Both Meade and Vance have gained reputations as being amongst the worst of Dublin's landlords. While not fully exonerating them of these charges Murtagh offers a nuanced account of their activities describing the improvements they made to their buildings (including the provision of toilet blocks) and showing how initially at least they strove to attract tenants who earned more than the average worker. In 1881 for instance a tenant in 14 Henrietta Street was advertising the sale of a piano for £14 10s. Conditions however deteriorated and by the 1890s middlemen were controlling the letting of what were increasingly becoming slums. Murtagh attributes some of this decline to the delegation of property management to agents and more generally to the profit motive of all concerned in what was an unregulated market. By the turn of the twentieth century Henrietta Street's tenements were notorious and most commentators were despondent about the future of the capital's urban spaces.
Murtagh does not however just tell a story of decline, he also seeks to understand the lived experience of the tenement dweller. This he does through a superb engagement with disparate surviving sources. Particularly good use is made of the series of 1913 photographs by John Cooke documenting Dublin tenement life as part of a government enquiry, as well as census records and surviving arrest records from the Dublin Metropolitan Police. The results of this research are illuminating and do much to draw out the daily realities of inner-city life at the turn of the century. The role of charities and religious institutions – notably the Daughters of Charity refuge and laundry on Henrietta Street – are dealt with sensitively and their controlling impulse is balanced with accounts of their essential role in what was a makeshift economy with little or no safety net. The cruelty of the times is however succinctly described in an account of two Henrietta Street boys of 10 and 11 being dispatched to an industrial school for four years for stealing boots in 1916.
Such anecdotes also warn the reader, as Murtagh notes, of the danger of concentrating on the bigger events of the revolutionary period. For many people the 1913–23 period in Dublin was less about revolution and more about daily survival. Poignant accounts of the deaths of inner-city soldiers at Galipoli and the Somme as well as the impact of the 1916 rising and war of independence on the streetscape and local economy reveal a less glamorous but no less important narrative of this period. The final sections of this impressive book look at how independent Ireland sought to address the housing crisis it inherited in 1921. Grand plans were drawn up for urban regeneration, but these did not come to fruition. Nevertheless, the achievements of the city corporation through its indefatigable city architect Herbert Simms’ design of modern flats, and through the planning and building of new garden suburbs, look even more impressive in retrospect.
Melanie Hayes and Tim Murtagh have in these two books made major contributions to the urban history of Dublin. Their granular focus on one, albeit one very important, street allows for a depth of research not always possible, but they are also each aware of the bigger picture and the wider historiography of the architectural, social and economic history of the city. Finally, the extraordinary production values of both books and the impressive picture research (both authors credit the input of Dublin City Council heritage officer Charles Duggan here) set a benchmark for the ways in which social history can be communicated in an accessible and informed way.