Paradise Alley by John D. Sheridan (Seven Towers, €11.99/£15.00)
Criostóir Ó Floinn
The title of this novel, first published in 1945, is a fictitious name for East Wall, the dockland area on the north bank of theLiffey, where the central character is an idealistic teacher in the local school during the first half of the 20th Century.
This welcome re-issue by a local publisher is evidence that East Wall has managed to survive as a vibrant community in the ever-expanding sprawl of modern Dublin – it was published as part of the celebration when East Wall won the national Pride of Place competition and is prefaced by a comprehensive essay, by publisher Sarah Lundberg and local historian Joe Mooney, on the social background to the story.
In the years before television began to impinge on the time devoted to reading books, John D. Sheridan was so popular that he was usually referred to as just John D. This was mainly due to his weekly column in the Irish Independent where his humorous observations of the foibles of his fellow-citizens caused him to be sometimes referred to as Ireland’s Charles Lamb.
Quiet and sincere
The critic Brian Cleeve claimed rightly enough Sheridan was “one of the most popular and best loved contemporary writers”. His last novel The Rest is Silence, called “quiet and sincere by one recent critic, was published in London and New York, but he never made the real breakthrough. Born in 1903, he died in 1980. Today he is all but forgotten.
Sheridan also wrote comic verses for adults and children, as well as a biography of the poet, James Clarence Mangan in 1937. In literary terms, however, the novel, Paradise Alley, was the work which made his reputation.
Although it inevitably shows its period — the author even assumes that his readers will understand a Latin quotation and have heard of Rerum Novarum — it is still an entertaining read and proof that a writer can reflect life without recourse to the vulgarity, profanity and lewdness that seem to be the staple ingredients of modem fiction.
There are two strands to the novel, one social and professional, the other personal and domestic. The main theme, deriving from the author’s own experience as a teacher for six years in East Wall, is a realistic study of social conditions in the area in the early decades of the 20th Century.
Bureaucratic
It also gives an insight into the conditions of the teaching profession itself, where the badly-paid teachers were subject to the authority of the parish priest as manager and to the bureaucratic inspectorial system.
The Rev. Manager in Paradise Alley, who graduates over the years from PP to canon to archdeacon, is untypically benevolent but slyly manipulative, while his handyman provides the stock Dublinese humour of a character in an O’Casey play.
The personal element in the story is one which helped to make the book a success in the Catholic Ireland of its time and that now incidentally illustrates the cataclysmic change in Irish society in the post-television era.
Of the teacher’s four children, the eldest, having been spoilt by a wealthy and doting grandfather, takes to gambling and licentious company, neglects religious practice and eventually goes off to join the RAF, but after he is killed a letter “from a Jesuit chaplain” consoles his grieving mother with the news that he had been to Confession and received Holy Communion before setting off on the fatal raid.
The younger son joins the Jesuits, one of the daughters becomes a Dominican nun and the other marries. When Paradise Alley was published in 1945, the Jesuit church was a central institution in my native Limerick; it closed some years ago. When I came to live in Co. Dublin 40 years ago, there was a long-established Dominican convent in Dun Laoghaire; it has been replaced by a supermarket.
The author of Paradise Alley would opine that our nation has gone down a blind alley. But the new readers of the novel itself will be brought in touch with the truly meaningful past.
