Remembering childhood years in Dublin, the writer Elizabeth Bowen described her fascination with the brass name plates that used to be standard where she lived:
“Daughter of a professional neighbourhood, I took this brass plate announcing its owner’s name to be the sine qua non of any gentleman’s house Just as the tombstone says ‘Here Lies’, the plate on the front door (in my view) said ‘Here Lives’.”
When she first noticed a big house without one, therefore, her haughty child’s mind was scandalised. Why should one resident “envelop himself in mystery?” she demanded to know. And on early visits to London, where lack of name plates was general, she thought this damning: “No wonder London is so large; all the nonentities settle [there]. Dublin has chosen to be smaller than London because she is grander and more exclusive. All the important people live in Dublin, near me.”
Passing the Bowens' former townhouse on Herbert Place one night recently, I noticed that the brass name plates have disappeared. But then so have the wealthy families who used to live here, on the borders of Dublin 2 and 4, replaced now mostly by offices.
La Vie en Rosa - the convention-defying artist Rosa Bonheur, born 200 years ago
Snakes Alive – the ominous associations of St Patrick’s Day
Orwell Appointed – Frank McNally on the raths, rats, and ratlines of a salubrious suburb
Sergei and the Wolf – Frank McNally on the tragic timing of Sergei Prokofiev
The childhood Bowen would today be scandalised by the seven large plastic plaques beside her old front door, announcing such abstract corporate identities as “Clarity” and “Logical”. She might be appeased, however, by the Dublin Tourism one alongside, declaring: “Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973 Writer) was born and spent her first seven winters in this house.”
If the brass name plates have vanished since her time, Dublin’s literary and historical plaques have multiplied. Even some humbler big houses have them now.
On a block of old Dublin Corporation flats near where I live in Dublin 8, for example, a series of bronze plaques commemorate current or former tenants. The difference with Bowen’s plates and the literary plaques is there are no names on these, only vignettes of lives lived, drawn from interviews with residents.
One plaque tells of a father who rarely spoke but once “caught me mitching from school and gave me an awful hiding”. Another mourns a wife and mother of seven who died in childbirth after being talked out of contraception by a priest.
A third recalls the struggles working horses used to have pulling loads up the nearby hill in winter. As horseshoes skidded on frozen cobbles, “sparks flew”.
On Dublin’s standard tourism plaques, by contrast, there is no room for story-telling. A case in point is number 1 Merrion Square which, as the former residence of the Wilde family, must also be the city’s most plaque-covered house, but with room for only bare biographical details.
On the left-hand side of the front wall is a plaque to Oscar, editing out his later tragedy and noting only that the "poet, dramatist, wit" lived here from 1855 to 1878. On the right is one – added just last year on her bicentenary – to his mother, Lady Jane Wilde (1821-1896), aka "Speranza". But the oldest and most elegant plaque is in between, commemorating Sir William Wilde (1815-1876), Oscar's father and Jane's husband.
As a leading surgeon of 19th-century Dublin, he must have had a brass name plate once. Now his official identity has been elevated to a grand, oval Portland stone plaque, set into the wall.
Of the official Wilde family, therefore, more that half have earned commemoration (Oscar had a brother and sister who have not made the cut). But before marrying Jane, William Wilde had also fathered three other children out of wedlock, including two daughters, Mary and Emily.
Although he acknowledged and supported the sisters, they could not be publicly his. Instead they were brought up by a clergyman brother in Monaghan, a convenient distance from Dublin gossip. And when they died there – horribly, in a fire – aged 22 and 24, that could not be publicly acknowledged either.
A discreet local coroner recorded the name as “Wylie”. The brief death notice in the Northern Standard said “Wilde”, but was calculated not to attract national media attention. Distraught as he is reported to have been, their father could not attend the funerals.
Even without such vignettes, William Wilde’s plaque has a lot to get in. It tells us that he was an “aural and ophthalmic surgeon, archaeologist, ethnologist, antiquarian, biographer, statistician, naturalist, topographer, historian, folklorist”.
That makes it one of the more voluble of Dublin plaques. But in so completely separating the respectable public life from the turbulent private, it lends a sad, ironic twist to Bowen’s parallel between “Here Lives” and “Here Lies”.