GEORGIANISM AND THE TENEMENTS, DUBLIN 1908–1926

This article examines how the Georgian domestic architecture of Dublin was represented across a period of major conflicts and political change in the city. By 1900 most of these Georgian houses had effectively become proletarianized and Catholicized through their conversion into tenements. ‘Georgianism’ arose in reaction to this transformation, partly out of a desire to record and conserve the houses and partly through panic about the tenements' inversion of social spaces and their consequent threat to the image of an ascendancy past and an imperial order in the present. Encompassing representations in visual art, in town planning and government reports, and, most extensively, in the volumes produced by Dublin's Georgian Society, the article argues that Georgianism involved a highly selective account of past glories but also one that projected a future in which the fantasy image of the eighteenth century would be reasserted. Whereas the approach to recording Georgian architecture either denied its present tenement‐dwellers or used the decayed state of these houses as a symptom of their condition, in Sean O'Casey's plays this same architecture was seen as a formative agent in subaltern identity, a location whose contrasts created a form of tragic‐comedy, engaging recursively with both present and past.