James Joyce's Ashpit

How many great writers have had archaeological digs in their back gardens?  

I learned that a Joyce excavation in Fairview, Dublin, was taking place in 2013, from PQ's blog, A Building Roam. He shared a story from the Irish Times, which declared 'While it is unlikely that the excavation will yield any lost manuscripts, it is still the first such exploration of a Joyce location that has been undertaken.'

The 2014 spring edition of Archaeology Ireland (top) has Andy Halpin and Mary Cahill's report on the secrets they uncovered in the ashpit of the Joyce family house at 8 Royal Terrace (now Inverness Rd) Fairview.  

Ashpits were rectangular sunken brick or concrete lined structures, for dumping the ashes from fires and other domestic rubbish. In the 19th century, the ashes were taken away to be used as fertiliser or material for brickmaking.  In Ireland and Britain, we still call rubbish collectors 'dustmen'. 

Here's a dustman from Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor.  

We meet a dustman in Finnegans Wake: 'A dustman nocknamed Sevenchurches in the employ of Messrs Achburn, Soulpetre and Ashreborn, prairmakers, Glintalook...' 59.16

I like 'Ashreborn' - the ashes from ashpits are reborn as bricks and new life from fertiliser.

'This ourth of years is not save brickdust and being humus the same roturns.' 18.04

The Joyces lived in 8 Royal Terrace from 1900-1901, and it's the setting for the chapter of A Portrait where Stephen walks to the University.  Joyce describes the wet rubbish in the lane behind the house, where the dustmen would have made their collections;

'The lane behind the terrace was waterlogged and as he went down it slowly, choosing his steps amid heaps of wet rubbish, he heard a mad nun screeching in the nuns’ madhouse beyond the wall.

—Jesus! O Jesus! Jesus!

He shook the sound out of his ears by an angry toss of his head and hurried on, stumbling through the mouldering offal, his heart already bitten by an ache of loathing and bitterness.'

The nun's screeching may explain why, in Finnegans Wake, Joyce renames the street 'Royal Terrors' (420.28).

By the late Victorian period, metal dustbins (ashcans in the USA) had largely replaced sunken ashpits, and so the one in Fairview wouldn't have been regularly cleared out. The ashpit in 'An Encounter' is a place 'where nobody ever came':

'I hid my books in the long grass near the ashpit at the end of the garden where nobody ever came and hurried along the canal bank.' 

A London dustman in 1910

In 'Araby', Joyce describes the smell of the ashpits in North Richmond Street, where the family lived in 1894-7:

'The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness.'

(Thanks to Hen Hanna for sharing these Dubliners quotes, when we were discussing the ashpit excavation)

Joyce talks about the same smells in a letter to his publisher:

'It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories.'

Joyce to Grant Richards, 24 September 1905, Letters II

ASHPIT ARCHAEOLOGY

The story of the dig began in 2012, when the house owner, Stephen D'Arcy, discovered the ashpit. From the archaeologist's report: 

'Stephen, a professional gardener, was preparing this part of the garden for planting when he discovered the walls of the ash pit. At first he thought that they were the footing for a barbecue stand, but he quickly realised that he had discovered something quite different when fragments of glass with images began to emerge from the pit. At this stage, having removed some of the glass fragments (he) recognised them as magic lantern slides....'

From the Irish Times report on the dig

Stephen contacted the National Museum of Ireland, who sent in the archaeologists:

'Magic lantern slides in a suburban garden ash pit seem a long way from the usual investigations of cist burials and bog butter, but the archaeological nature of the discovery and the possible connection to important historical persons and events fit perfectly with the discipline of archaeological inquiry....The excavation of the ash pit took place over a week in February 2013, directed by Andy Halpin. Excavating an ash pit is not unlike excavating a Bronze Age cist burial, as the area to be excavated, confined by its concrete walls, is similar and the ashy deposit is also reminiscent of cremated deposits.'

Here's their photo of the excavated ashpit, which does look like a cist burial.

'charnelcysts of a weedwastewoldwevild' 613.21

'the hollow chyst excitement' 596.28

Cist burial, from Davis and Thurman's Crania Britannica, 1865

The dig revealed more than 250 complete and fragmented slides, mostly showing religious subjects. Some of them were painted, others posed photographs. Labels on the slides show they were bought from John Lizar's of Glasgow (which also had offices in Edinburgh, Liverpool and Belfast).

One of the ashpit slides, showing a scene from the Pilgrim's Progress

A John Lizar's magic lantern

In a great piece of detective work, the archaeologists suggest that the slides belonged to Thomas McBratney, a Presbyterian lay preacher who lived in the house from 1918 until his death in 1921. The slides must have been thrown away after his death, perhaps while Joyce was beginning Finnegans Wake.

THE ASHPIT BOOKS

Finding religious magic lantern slides in this ashpit is an astounding synchronicity. For this was the very ashpit, where in 1901, the Joyce family found two books.

'Somebody found at the end of the garden two books which the children nicknamed 'the ashpit books'. One was a song-book, the first pages of which were missing. It contained a large and miscellaneous collection of classical and traditional songs, popular ballads and many so-called comic songs, the humour of which always remained a mystery to me. The other was a closely and badly printed collated edition of the four gospels in a red cloth cover. The former tenants of the house were Protestants...As the little volume was still quite presentable, though the cloth of one cover was detached from the cardboard owing to exposure to weather, I put it on my shelf.'

Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, p113-114

'The splendour of the trove may have been the origin of another of John Stanislaus Joyce's sardonic catchphrases when anything was in short supply: 'Have you tried the ash-pit?'

John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello, John Stanislaus Joyce, Fourth Estate, 1997, p227

Catholic families did not have Bibles, so the book was a revelation for Stanislaus, then aged 16. After reading it from cover to cover, 'the immediate result was the uneasy prompting of doubt.'  The ashpit book discovery led Stanislaus to lose his faith. 

'My mother blamed Jim for my blunt refusal to go to confession or Communion, but she was wrong, for in point of time, at least, I refused first.'

Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, p118

THE MIDDEN

The ashpit books recall the discovery in Finnegans Wake of a letter in a 'fatal midden' by Biddy the hen.  'Midden' is an archaeological term for a mound of domestic refuse, often food remains (kitchen middens). 

'This midden is a symbol, elaborated later, for the inhabited world in which men have left so many traces. The letter stands as a symbol for all attempts at written communication including all other letters, all the world's literature, the Book of Kells, all manuscripts, all the sacred books of the world, and also Finnegans Wake itself. One reason why The Book of Kells is included here is that it was once 'stolen by night...and found after a lapse of some months, concealed under sods' (Sullivan)'

J.S.Atherton, The Books at the Wake p62-3

Like the ashpit book, the Book of Kells is also a New Testament.

Joyce may also have known that, since 1897, archaeologists were discovering vast amounts of Ancient Greek literature on papyrus scrolls from the dusty rubbish dumps of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. 

Grenfel and Hunt's photo of their dig in Oxyrhynchus

The very first document discovered here was part of a previously unknown Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic collection of the 'hidden sayings' of Jesus.  Read a transcript here.

Oxyrhynchus 1, The Gospel of Thomas

The hen, scratching at the heap, is like one of these archaeologists. The letter she finds seems to be from an Irish American woman in Boston to her sister Maggy:

'The bird in the case was Belinda of the Dorans...and what she was scratching at the hour of klokking twelve looked for all this zogzag world like a goodish-sized sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass.) of the last of the first to Dear whom it proceded to mention Maggy well & allathome’s health...'111.05-11

Later in the Wake, this letter is explicitly linked with the ashpit

'a letter to last a lifetime for Maggi beyond by the ashpit' 211.22

In the heat of the midden, this Boston letter has been transformed, like a melting photographic negative of a horse:

'If a negative of a horse happens to melt enough while drying, well, what you do get is, well, a positively grotesquely distorted macromass of all sorts of horsehappy values and masses of meltwhile horse....this freely is what must have occurred to our missive.... Heated residence in the heart of the orangeflavoured mudmound had partly obliterated the negative to start with, causing some features palpably nearer your pecker to be swollen up most grossly...' 111.26-36

Horse negative, from pixabey.com

This makes it astounding that archaeologists should have found magic lantern slides in the ashpit. 

A photographic slide from the ashpit

Thanks to PQ for making the connection between the slides and the melting negative in his blog, where he relates this to Robert Anton Wilson, the biggest Wake synchronicity hunter.

To sum up this web of psychogeographic synchronicities:

1897 Archaeologists in Egypt discover a Gospel of Thomas in the rubbish dumps of Oxyrhynchus.

1901 At 8 Royal Terrace, Fairview, the Joyces find an edition of the four gospels in the ashpit.

1905 Joyce writes 'An Encounter,' in which the boy narrator hides his books 'in the long grass near the ashpit at the end of the garden where nobody ever came.'

Joyce writes to Grant Richards, 'It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories.'

1921 Lay preacher Thomas McBratney's religious magic lantern slides find their way into the ashpit.

1923 Joyce writes the Hen chapter of Finnegans Wake, in which a letter dug out of a midden is compared with a melting photographic negative and a New Testament, the Book of Kells. This document has 'acquired accretions of terricious matter while loitering in the past' (114.28)

2013 The ashpit is excavated and the magic lantern slides discovered.

There might be even more synchronicities if we knew about the book of comic songs.

WALKING TO FAIRVIEW

Lisa and I made a pilgrimage to Fairview in June, during the Ulysses centenary celebrations, retracing the route Stephen takes from his home to the University, in reverse.  Father Conmee, who also walks part of the same route in Ulysses, is commemorated on Newcomen Bridge.

'His morning walk across the city had begun, and he foreknew that as he passed the sloblands of Fairview he would think of the cloistral silverveined prose of Newman; that as he walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti and smile'

Standing in front of the house,  I felt I was close to one of the key locations of Finnegans Wake.