At the end of Lotus Eaters Bloom sees that the
southeastern gate of Trinity College is manned by an attendant
in a gatehouse: "There's Hornblower standing at the
porter's lodge." At the end of Wandering Rocks this
man is seen again in the same spot, saluting the viceregal
cavalcade as it passes by: "Deep in Leinster street by
Trinity's postern a loyal king's man, Hornblower, touched
his tallyho cap." The Trinity porters were, as the word
suggests, gatekeepers, but they also maintained order and
decorum throughout the campus. They dressed in a strangely
distinctive style that made them look like country gentlemen
on a fox hunt—hence "tallyho."
In a short article titled "Images of College: An Afterword,"
Hermathena (1992): 151-53, Englishman Gerald Morgan
describes his 1968 arrival at TCD: "I entered Front Gate [the
one in the west] at about seven o'clock in a sickly and
exhausted state, having just survived three and a half hours
on a choppy Irish Sea, two pints of Guinness (I have drunk no
more from that day to this), and an exposition of the rules of
Gaelic football. I stared uncertainly through the drizzle and
mist, and my gaze fixed upon an imposing figure in a
riding hat and a frock-coat. I surmised that he must be a
gentleman scholar or country squire, but I could see no sign
of a stables and there were no hounds pawing the cobbled
stones in Parliament Square. Like most Englishmen my
ignorance of Ireland was extensive, and here it was complete,
for the country squire turned out to be a porter. Moreover
the porters were less impressed by their uniforms than I had
been, and considered themselves to be an object of ridicule,
no less indeed than flunkeys. In the next few years they
mounted a vigorous campaign to change both the uniform and the
accompanying terminology of porter, and have long since
established themselves as security guards wearing flat-peaked
hats like gendarmes."
Bloom's familiarity with the gatekeeper is the closest the
reader of Ulysses ever gets to entering the walled
confines of this distinguished university, an immensely
important part of Irish culture that was largely off limits to
the Catholic populace on whom Joyce centered his story. The
novel merely glances at the porter's "tallyho cap,"
declining to mock the outlandish getup that porters were
finding so humiliating in 1968. (In Circe the
fox-hunting connection does rise to the level of ridicule: "A
pack of bloodhounds, led by Hornblower of Trinity
brandishing a dogwhip in tallyho cap and an old pair of
grey trousers, follows from far, picking up the scent,
nearer, baying, panting.") The simple detail of
the cap does manage to signify, however, that the people
behind those walls are culled from the landed gentry, the
fox-hunting set once called the Ascendancy. The porter, like
Trinity's Protestant students and faculty, is "a loyal
king's man," proudly saluting Ireland's viceregal rulers
as they pass by.
Slote argues that "Hornblower is not the porter's name but,
rather, a reference to the uniform" and to the "black peak cap
like those worn by fox-hunters." It does seem likely that
Joyce chose this name to evoke fox hunting, since no one to my
knowledge has ever identified a real Hornblower who worked as
a Trinity porter. The sentence in Wandering Rocks—"a
loyal king's man, Hornblower, touched his tallyho cap"—could
be read as a flight of authorial fancy linking unionism to a
man characterized as the horn-blowing leader of a hunt.
But the capital H does not fit this reading very well. Apart
from the Bunyanesque prose in Oxen of the Sun, Joyce
does not normally personify his symbolic abstractions in this
way. In Lotus Eaters, moreover, Bloom does not seem to
be performing any such flight of fancy: "There's Hornblower
standing at the porter's lodge. Keep him on hands: might
take a turn in there on the nod. How do you do, Mr
Hornblower? How do you do, sir?" This sounds like one of
Bloom's realistic thoughts about respectfully hitting someone
up for a favor. Mr. Hornblower appears as a character in Circe,
and Molly thinks of him in Penelope: "I was with him
with Milly at the College races that Hornblower with the
childs bonnet on the top of his nob let us into by the back
way."
The name Hornblower seems to be rare in Ireland but it is
fairly common in England, and many English people have studied
or worked at Trinity College. Joyce could very plausibly have
made it the "real" name of a fictive porter while still
loading it with strong imaginative suggestions, as he does,
for instance, with.....Bloom.
