Small wonder

“We’re all storytellers; it’s what makes us Irish, apart from our love of the pint,” quipped my friend Antoinette Reilly, a Dubliner, as she translated the Gaelic term seanchaí (pronounced Shaw-ne-key). Once upon a time, when parchment, quills, and script were the privileges of a few, the Celts adopted a pragmatic way of passing on history and culture: word of mouth. And the traditional Irish raconteur was born, armed with a repertoire of stories, an ability to wax lyrical and make the mundane seem fascinating. I happened to meet a modern-day seanchaí, the tour guide Adam Lawlor, at the Little Museum of Dublin.

Set in a charming Georgian townhouse, the museum dates back to the 18th century, with a colourful ‘Doors of Dublin’ as its distinguishing feature. Back when the town was filled with identical houses, legend has it that one too many bottles of Guinness led many an Irishman to stumble into the wrong home! Dubliners got creative and painted their doors in distinctive colours — from canary yellow to deep reds — so even the most inebriated wouldn’t go wrong. These multi-hued doors later began to be featured in tourism adverts, making them an iconic marker of the city.

I walk into the museum on the first storey and come upon a cosy living area, complete with a warm fireplace, sink-into sofas, a Victorian armchair loosely draped by a hand-woven quilt, and showcases crammed to the hilt. Upon looking closely at the oddities in the cabinets, I find that many are accompanied by little notes: there’s a cast which is ‘a facsimile of James Joyce’s death mask’; half-drunk bottles of decades-old Irish whiskey, a model of a long-ship since ‘Dublin was a Viking city’, and many more. Suddenly I hear a booming voice, and look up to see a man dressed in black trousers, an immaculate white shirt, bow-tie, and a top-hat. This is Lawlor, who appears to have walked straight out of the 19th century. He doffs his hat to our group of 15 visitors, before leading us into a forgotten era.

I expect him to start with the most prized item in the room, but instead he has us looking out the window at St Stephen’s Greens, ‘the centre of Dublin life’. To throw in a bit of time-travel, Lawlor asks us to close our eyes and “picture the 1900s on these streets: women in trailing gowns and broad-brimmed hats helped out of carriages by men in full suits. One among them was a gentleman named Patrick Pearce”. To assist in the visualisation, we’re directed to a black-and-white picture above the fireplace, that of Patrick Pearce, a revolutionary and leader of the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule. Another leader of the rebellion was ‘a beauty named Maud Gonne’.

As he speaks of her, Lawlor points to a picture of WB Yeats. The poet was in love with the elegant and courageous Gonne. He proposed marriage thrice, but she rejected him — one of the foremost names in literature — every time. It wasn’t just Gonne who wasn’t too fond of him. Yeats rejected violence as a means to secure Irish independence, and thereby irked the nationalists. Lawlor breaks out into a poem, bringing out the patriots’ sentiments:

WB Yeats has always been the trump of our hates,

his (political) views resting on,

his love of Maude Gonne,

who wouldn’t go out on his dates!

Moving from the unrequited love-story, harking back to the turbulent times, Lawlor explains that Stephen’s Green was the scene of fierce fighting and “500 civilians and 40 children were killed”. The fighting was stopped for an hour every day. We try to decipher the reason: ‘prayers’, ‘tea-time’, ‘A pint’... Not really, it was to ensure that the park-keeper, James Kearney, could feed the resident ducks.

We’re next directed to a photo of a ‘little old lady in a carriage’ and asked to guess her identity. Clue: ‘as popular in Ireland as a cold-sore’. This is Queen Victoria or ‘the famine queen’. I look closely at the grainy picture, from April 1900, when she arrived in Kingstown (now Dún Loughaire) to recruit Irishmen to fight with the British in the Boer War.

Lawlor points out that all the items in the museum were donated by locals, and as more come in, the museum continually changes.

We are led to the inner room, where we come across a first edition of Ulysses, dated 1922. “We keep it open on the last page so that when we leave today, we can all say we’ve finished the book!” No small feat, given that the book has the heft of a brick and is, ironically, about one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, and his odyssey through Dublin.

The room also has a more recent picture of Yeats, taken in 1923 after he’d won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He isn’t the only accomplished writer in this inner room — there’s a postcard signed by Samuel Beckett. As part of a school project, a 12-year-old boy wrote a letter to the previous owner of his home. The boy was overjoyed at receiving a response from none other than Beckett, explaining what it was like to grow up in that house. But the Nobel Prize winner ended with, “If you ever meet my ghost in the house or the grounds, give it my regards.”

The artefacts, more than 5,000 in all, range from two-tone posters of Che Guevara, designed by an Irishman Jim Fitzpatrick, to ‘Think Big’ art by Caroline McCarthy, wherein Monster Munch crisps, a snack synonymous with the ’90s, is encased in 24-karat gold. It is a metaphor for the bubble that was the Celtic Tiger.

Lawlor signs off with words from another Dubliner, George Bernard Shaw, “You see things, and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were, and I say ‘Why not?’”

An apt quotation for a museum that was fascinatingly pieced together from donations.

Travel Log

Getting there

Fly Mumbai/Delhi/Chennai to Dublin, on British Airways, with a stopover in London

Get around

Museum timings and cost: Open on all days, 9.30am to 5pm; Thursdays open until 8pm.

Admission is €8. Senior citizens and students pay €6. The guided tours start on the hour, every hour and are included in the ticket price.

Kiran Mehta is a Mumbai-based journalist