As Bloom returns to his house after his shopping trip, he
looks at the "Blotchy brown brick houses" on the other side of
Eccles Street: "Number eighty still unlet. Why is that?
Valuation is only twenty-eight. Towers, Battersby, North,
MacArthur: parlour windows plastered with bills." Joyce here
transferred what he knew about number 7 to number 88,
preserving an impression of the problems plaguing Dublin real
estate.
In 1904, Gifford notes, the house at 7 Eccles Street "was
valued at £28 and was vacant." Number 80, by contrast, was
valued at £17 and was occupied. So, having moved the fictional
Blooms into number 7, Joyce fictively assigned its vacancy and
its valuation to a house across the street. And to the parlor
windows of that house he attached signs from four different
Dublin realtors, advertising its availability and blighting
its appearance.
Dublin real estate in 1904 was a disaster. Conditions in the
countryside during the 19th century, not least the famines of the 1840s, had
impelled thousands of peasants to relocate to the city,
turning formerly elegant
Georgian brick townhouses into miserably crowded slum
dwellings. Many rich and middle-class Dubliners responded by
moving to nearby towns that were becoming suburbs of the
metropolis, leaving behind them an even more blasted
cityscape. On the pages of Thom's,
middle-class residents are listed at some addresses,
while many others are "Vacant," or "Tenements" housing
uncounted and unnamed impoverished families, or "Ruins."
