Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  Civil society prospered alongside the social whirl. ‘Society was never anywhere, perhaps, more brilliant than in Dublin in the years which succeeded 1782,’ wrote the historian J. A. Froude in the mid-nineteenth century. ‘The great Peers and Commoners had cast in their lot with the national life. They had their castles in the country and their town houses in the Irish metropolis. Their lives had a public purpose. They were conscious of high responsibilities; and if they were not always wise, they had force and dignity of character.’34 This civic sensibility made itself felt through organizations such as the Dublin Society, established in 1731 as a grouping of high-minded Ascendancy types committed to the ‘improvement’ of the city of Dublin and the development of a more sophisticated, metropolitan discourse. Georgian Dublin, during its ‘winter season’ of November to March, began to rival whatever Hanoverian London could offer. Clubland was well supplied by the Sackville, the Kildare and Daly’s. The latest plays were quick to make their way on to the stage at the Theatre Royal, Smock Alley, Crow Street (said to be ‘as ample and magnificent as Drury Lane’) or Stretche’s Theatre. The legendary eighteenth-century actor David Garrick played Hamlet in Dublin before taking it to London, whilst Thomas Sheridan performed a series of Shakespeare plays at Crow Street. A slightly more vernacular popular entertainment could be found at the Great Musick Hall in Fishamble Street or the Great Assembly Rooms in Brunswick Street. In the winter of 1764–5, for instance, there were thirteen grand balls advertised, thirteen assemblies, twenty-five concerts and one ‘entertainment’ sponsored by the lord lieutenant. Many of the concerts, balls and performances were put together for charitable causes, with the likes of the Duchess of Leinster and Lady Charlemont in charge of their promotion and patronage. Hospitals, baths and funds for the poor were the usual recipients of such social largesse.35 Indeed, the most important musical event of eighteenth-century Dublin – the preview of Handel’s Messiah, at the Fishamble Music Hall in 1742 – was a charitable performance in aid, at Handel’s request, of Mercer’s Hospital, the Charitable Infirmary and the Charitable Musical Society. The 700-strong crowd (with ladies asked to remove hoops from their skirts to allow for more audience members) which was lucky enough to hear the first expression of this defining contribution to Hanoverian culture raised £400 ‘for the relief of the Prisoners in several Gaols, and for the Support of Mercer’s hospital in Stephen street, and of the charitable infirmary on the inn’s quay’. And the city knew it had witnessed something special. ‘On Tuesday last Mr Handel’s Sacred Grand Oratorio, the MESSIAH, was performed at the New Musick-Hall in Fishamble Street,’ reported the Dublin Journal; ‘the best Judges allowed it to be the most finished piece of Musick. Words are wanting to express the exquisite Delight it afforded to the admiring crouded Audience. The Sublime, the Grand, and the Tender, adapted to the most elevated, majestic and moving Words, conspired to transport and charm the ravished Heart and Ear.’36

  An equally celebrated institution within Dublin civil society was Dr Bartholomew Mosse’s Hospital Rotunda. ‘They have devised in Dublin a rather singular form of entertainment, the proceeds of which are applied to the maintenance of a Maternity Hospital,’ recorded the French cavalry officer Jacques Louis de Bougrenet on his travels through the city.

  It is called a Promenade, and the name made me wish to go and see one. The visitors walk in a circular hall called the Rotunda, and while there is somewhat more freedom than that which obtains at private entertainments, people only mix with, and speak to, members of their own circle. After a certain time a bell sounded, and the company hurried through a door just opened, and groups of friends settled round tea-tables.37

  Seeking to raise funds for his Lying-in Hospital, the entrepreneurial Dr Mosse managed to establish the Pleasure Grounds (‘a polite place of amusement’) surrounding his maternity hospital – around Rutland Square, in the fashionable north of the city – as the place for conspicuous display by Dublin society. It was to be Dublin’s answer to London’s Vauxhall Gardens, where the smart set came to mingle and mutually admire. A series of balls, public subscriptions and levées managed to raise the funds Mosse needed to establish some decent maternity care within the city, along with one of Dublin’s most recognizable medical institutions. Like Leinster before him (whose children he, in fact, helped to deliver), Mosse turned to the fashionable Richard Cassels to design the hospital, but it was Cassels’ architectural successor John Ensor who in 1764 added the Rotunda as a space for further mingling, conversazione and fund-raising. ‘Here they have an organ and orchestra for concerts, in the wet evenings of summer, and for balls in winter,’ one visitor wrote admiringly in the 1770s. ‘So that, upon the whole, this is the Vauxhall, Ranelagh, and Pantheon of Dublin.’38

  NEVER SO SPLENDID A METROPOLIS

  In contrast to both Bridgetown and Boston – whose urban plans had developed organically, even chaotically, as their colonial economies expanded – the architecture of Georgian Dublin was far more obviously shaped by a cohesive civic vision. As such, it exhibited markedly fewer spaces for meaningful interaction between different communities. There was little of that cross-cultural exchange evident in Bridgetown. Instead, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Dublin became a bullish colonial capital with a city centre controlled by the great Anglo-Irish aristocrats and their property development schemes. The Protestant Ascendancy followed the Duke of Leinster into the city from their vast, rural plantations and transformed the Anglo-Norman remnants of Dublin into a spectacular embodiment of their imperial identity.

  Initially, these mid-eighteenth century developments were focused on the townhouses of Leinster House and Charlemont House, as well as the eponymous Powerscourt House on South William Street (designed by Richard Cassels for the third Viscount Powerscourt) and Tyrone House on Marlborough Street (for Marcus Beresford, Earl of Tyrone). The grandiose style and iconography of these houses represented a transfer of the system of Protestant landholding from the Irish countryside into the capital: this was plantation planning in an urban setting, displaying the same belief in asserting control and dominion through an architecture designed to defend the Ascendancy from the Catholic majority. It was what would mark Dublin out from both Edinburgh New Town (begun in the 1760s) and the building of Bath. Rather than submerging its streetscapes into classical uniformity, colonial Dublin prided itself on its brace of spectacular townhouses.

  And it turned out that designs for rural Maynooth would work equally well in city-centre Mountjoy Square. The stately homes which dominated the Ascendancy’s agricultural estates in plantation Ireland were assertions of cultural power over the indigenous peasantry, which drew upon Palladian designs stretching back to the Venetian Republic’s colonialism in the sixteenth century.39 This was the aesthetic which was now transplanted into Dublin as large private estates on the suburbanizing fringes, abutting the old city walls, were bought up by Anglo-Irish aristocrats as well as new-money merchants such as Luke Gardiner and Humphrey Jervis.

  After the grand houses came the tree-lined squares and the high-windowed Georgian terraces which would come to symbolize the domestic architecture of Dublin. Here the comparisons with Edinburgh were more apparent as plots were leased to architects and developers, but styles and landscaping were tightly controlled with a series of clauses designed to secure a pleasing and profitable appearance. Leading up to Belvedere House (1786), for instance, was laid out North Great George’s Street, which could still be described in the 1970s as ‘the finest example … of a complete Georgian avenue … contain[ing] all the merits and traits of the period: iron snuffers, fine wrought iron work, fanlights, grilles, bell pulls and lanterns’. Around Mountjoy Square were erected the terraces of Fitzgibbon Street and Great Charles Street. Similarly, Fitzwilliam Street Lower, Merrion Street and Merrion Square (all named after the ancestral home – Merrion Castle – of the Viscounts Fitzwilliam) were developed in the 1790s with large mansions, four storeys over basement, and wide street frontages. In 1769 Mornington House
, part of a set of terraces stretching along Merrion Street, would be the birthplace of one of the greatest warriors of the British Empire, Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, and provide the Dublin residence for the Mornington clan.

  Those contracted to build such townhouses had to operate under highly exacting instructions. Mr Boylan, building on the west side of Fitzwilliam Street, was only to construct a ‘good and substantial Dwelling House of the best Materials, well roofed and covered with Slates, [and] not less than three storeys and a half high above the cellars’.40 Any deviation from these guidelines threatened to fall foul of the Wide Street Commissioners – Dublin’s all-powerful enforcer of aesthetic rigour. The origins of this extraordinarily innovative planning committee can be traced to 1757 with the passing of an Act ‘for making a wide and convenient Way, Street, or Passage, from Essex-bridge to the Castle of Dublin’. A consortium of MPs, aldermen, earls, viscounts, mayors and magistrates, christened ‘the Commissioners for Making Wide and Convenient Ways, Streets and Passages’ (otherwise known as ‘the Wide Street Commissioners’), was drawn together to oversee the implementation of the Act, and, over the ensuing decades, it was their tight grip over Dublin’s urban plan which would furnish ‘so splendid a metropolis for so poor a country’. The Act gave the Commissioners extensive powers over compulsory purchase (a jury having established the value of any property under seizure) and then the allocation of development rights to different contractors who had to build under a rigid series of stipulations.41 Their philosophy was ‘Order, Uniformity and Convenience’, and their ambition was to unclog the arteries of the ancient Norman core: promote circulation, clear space for the erection of fine new buildings and create a cityscape more reflective of Dublin’s place under the imperial Crown. Major axes, thoroughfares and viae triumphales were opened up linking the townhouses of the Protestant Ascendancy with the squares, terraces and civic monuments. The Commissioners’ work entailed a comprehensive vision of the city as the stage-set for the display of colonial grandeur. As so often in the cities of the British Empire, improvement became the cloak for dominance.42

  The rebuilding of Essex Bridge in the early 1750s was the initial spur to development. The architect George Semple drew upon the recently completed Westminster Bridge in London for inspiration, as well as ‘the Methods which were at that Time in Agitation, for opening the Streets in London and Westminster’. However, the Pont Royal in Paris also ‘led me to think of forming a Plan, to get a Street opened in a direct Line of 51 Feet broad from the Bridge to the Castle’.43 Such a street, Parliament Street, linking Essex Bridge (now Grattan Bridge) to Dublin Castle, was opened in 1762. It was much more than a traffic-relief solution to the tight quayside of the Liffey; it was also a contribution to ‘the adorning of those parts of the city’ with a newly impressive approach to Dublin Castle from the river.44 Buoyed with tax receipts from their municipal monopoly over coal sales, the Commissioners now pursued an assertive programme of beautification: Dame Street and Nassau Street were widened, Upper Merrion Street, Baggott Street and Westmoreland Street laid out. The Commissioners’ greatest triumph, in conjunction with the wily property developer Luke Gardiner, was Sackville Street, stretching from the Rotunda Hospital in the north across the newly built Carlisle Bridge and down towards Trinity College. As today’s O’Connell Street, the ambition of the Wide Street Commissioners remains apparent – it is a resplendent, commercial boulevard. ‘By the end of the eighteenth century a person wishing to travel from Dublin Castle to Rutland Square could proceed through an urban landscape that in scale and architectural uniformity rivalled many a Continental city.’45 Indeed, Dublin often seemed to regard itself as a natural extension of continental Europe with the Wide Street Commissioners involved in an urban project of Enlightenment order, elegance and aesthetic harmony.

  The work of the Wide Street Commission. Elevation of the west front and plan of Mountjoy Square laid out on the rising ground, near St George’s Church (1787).

  Visitors were certainly impressed by the transformation of the Irish capital into a city of such metropolitan ambition. ‘Few cities can boast more extensive conveniences, more eminent beauties, than Dublin,’ wrote one architectural booster, ‘in addition to its natural excellence, its works of art rival, and in some instances excel, those appropriated to the same purposes in any other country; it is still expanding, and as it were, unfolding new lustre.’46 Nathaniel Jefferys was particularly taken with the unfolding urban vista. The new Dame Street, he thought, was ‘the greatest thoroughfare in Dublin for the carriages of the nobility’.

  It is of a great width, and being filled with elegant shops of various descriptions, forms one of the most accustomed and amusing lounges in the city of Dublin; where, from the groups of elegant women continually passing and repassing, and the numerous parties of military officers from the barracks, (foraging in fruit shops) it bears a strong resemblance to the London Bond-street.

  Carlisle Bridge (O’Connell Bridge) was a further triumph – ‘another very elegant specimen of architectural taste, it consists of three arches, and is ten feet wider than Westminster Bridge. It forms a very grand communication between the north and south sides of the river, one end of it leading through Westmoreland-street to College Green, and the other opening immediately into Sackville-street.’47 For others, such obvious prosperity was all a little unreal. Dublin struck one English observer like being ‘at table with a man who gives me Burgundy, but whose attendant is a bailiff disguised in livery’.48

  Yet it was not all just show: Georgian Dublin also witnessed the beginnings of a move from private ostentation to public spirit. The architecture of the city was extended beyond the great townhouses of the Ascendancy into buildings which celebrated a more civic sensibility. Central to this extension was the relationship between the architect James Gandon and John Beresford, chief commissioner of the Irish revenue and one of the most influential of the Wide Street Commissioners. Both men played vital roles in the migration of Dublin’s development eastwards, and the visual elevation of the city with some of Europe’s most striking Palladian works. There were, happily, some pre-existing artefacts to work with. Sir Edward Lovett Pearce’s Irish Houses of Parliament (1729) on College Green was a monumental work of architecture designed to rival the Westminster parliament itself. ‘No edifice that we recollect in the British metropolis can be compared for simple elegance with this,’ wrote one visitor. ‘It is perhaps in this respect the chef d’oeuvre of our imperial architecture.’ 49 Its colonnade of Ionic columns, its three statues representing Hibernia, Fidelity and Commerce above the portico, and its array of Venetian windows spoke to a more extensive vision of Ireland’s place in the imperial nexus than simple colony. In the 1780s, James Gandon was asked to add to the building’s lustre with a new entrance for the House of Lords facing on to Westmoreland Street. Whilst the grubby MPs had to make do with an Ionic colonnade, the peers’ portico enjoyed six fine Corinthian columns, above which sat three further statues signifying Wisdom, Justice and Liberty.*

  Work on the Parliament House came after Gandon’s success in designing his greatest commission, Dublin’s new Custom House. But for the rattle of trains on the overhead bridge and the hum of traffic around Beresford Place, today the Custom House sits serenely on the banks of the Liffey near the remnants of the old docks. On the eastern edges of the city’s commercial district, its location seems an obvious choice for ships accessing the Irish Sea. But at the time, John Beresford was involved in a bitter struggle to drag development downstream and away from the traditional legal and corporate centre around the old walled city. On marshy ground, a mile away from the original site on Essex Quay, the Custom House was to be another ‘great and munificent improvement’ which would add considerably to the ‘ornament and convenience of the metropolis’. It took ten years to construct, with extensive engineering involved in the embedding of riverbank foundations, but was instantly heralded as a triumph of neo-classicism. ‘The most sumptuous edifi
ce of the kind in Europe,’ exclaimed John James McGregor in his New Picture of Dublin (1821). ‘It is finished in the Doric order, with an entablature, and bold projecting cornice. On the attic story, over the pillars of the portico, are statues of Neptune, Plenty, Industry and Mercury.’ Crowning the dome was a 5-metre high statue of Hope, resting on her anchor.

  Just as on Somerset House on London’s Strand, riverine heads dotted the keystones above the doors and windows on the ground floor, here depicting the Liffey, the Foyle, the Boyne, the Shannon and other great waterways. The Custom House’s most telling iconography, however, was a carving of the Arms of Ireland, a woman and a harp, being embraced by the Lion and the Unicorn of Great Britain. Figures representing Great Britain and Ireland ‘are seated on a car of shell,’ continued McGregor, ‘Neptune, with his Trident, driving away Famine and Despair, while a fleet at a distance approaches in full sail.’50 Should anyone remain in doubt about the message, the theme was the ‘Union of Empire’ representing ‘the friendly union of Britannia and Hibernia, with good consequences relating to Ireland’.51

  After the Custom House came the Four Courts, Gandon’s second great civic building on the north bank of the Liffey, which allowed the Law Courts to leave their the cramped old conditions in Christ Church Cathedral. The domed roof of the Courts still provides one of Dublin’s most instantly recognizable skylines. Its vaulted rotunda provides a perfect space under which clerks can gossip and lawyers confer with clients before disappearing into the court rooms, which siphon off the central hall. ‘It is a truly magnificent pile of architecture,’ thought Nathaniel Jefferys. ‘The extent of its front toward the river is 433 feet, and from the uses to which it is applied, Englishmen naturally consider it as the Westminster Hall of Dublin.’52 Edward Smyth, the sculptor of the Custom House, was let loose on the stonework and provided five powerful statues on the central block representing Wisdom, Justice, Moses, Mercy and Authority. The prospect of Dublin from Carlisle Bridge, looking towards the Four Courts, now presented the pedestrian with ‘such a cluster of architectural beauties grouped together, or scattered in every direction which he turns, as are not to be seen from any other spot in any other city … Strangers who visit Dublin are particularly struck with the beauty of this assemblage of objects.’53