GEORGIANISM AND THE TENEMENTS, DUBLIN 1908–1926 MARK CRINSON The eighteenth century seemed a golden age to many in early twentieth-century Dublin. Fuelled by the work of the great Liberal Unionist historian W.E.H. Lecky and sustained by the writing of W.B. Yeats, this dream of an age when ‘the sunlight of hope shone brightly upon [Ireland]’, in Lecky’s words, also included the architecture and material culture of the period. 1 In the eighteenth century Dublin, known as the second city of the empire, had been reshaped and fitted out with monumental public buildings, its quays rebuilt and great parks laid out, its streets widened and the city expanded with terraced houses of ‘noble propor- tions’ fit for this newly ‘brilliant and hospitable society’. 2 But in the early twentieth century this golden age seemed both distant and tantalizingly near, its achievements shockingly neglected but everywhere apparent, a heritage perhaps to receive its final obsequies with the rise of a new political order. This separation from the present by neglect and decline seemed most apparent in the tenements that had taken over Dublin’s Georgian houses and effectively proletarianized and Catholicized its architectural heritage. Whenever these tenements are repre- sented there is the sense of a dramatically clashing, mocking, or barely repressed contrast between a grand past and a squalid present; between the most refined forms of a vanished society and the most abject effects of contemporary depriv- ation, with all that that abjection implies of a disrespect for borders and a disturbance of identity and order. The contrast obviously has resonance with other cities: the strata of slum on palace that Rome represented to many travel- lers, the eviscerated colonial villas of post-Independence Calcutta, or, perhaps more closely, the crowded cellars and tenements of Georgian Liverpool. 3 But arguably none had the same acute sense of an imperial city harbouring the elements of its own downfall within the very buildings of its past eminence. The city’s architecture was a locus, both metaphorical and real, of polarized entities and inverted social spaces. ‘Georgianism’ is the term given in this article to the discourse that arose in reaction to this transformation, partly out of a belated desire to record and ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141-6790 . VOL 29 NO 4 . SEPTEMBER 2006 pp 625–659 & Association of Art Historians 2006. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 625 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.