83 (U548.148) What did Stephen see on raising his gaze

Cast 83. Page 548, line 148.

　What did Stephen see on raising his gaze to the height of a yard from the fire towards the opposite wall?

　Under a row of five coiled spring housebells a curvilinear rope, stretched between two holdfasts athwart across the recess beside the chimney pier, from which hung four smallsized square handkerchiefs folded unattached consecutively in adjacent rectangles and one pair of ladies’ grey hose with Lisle suspender tops and feet in their habitual position clamped by three erect wooden pegs two at their outer extremities and the third at their point of junction.

This is from Episode 17. The whole of Episode 17 is written in the form of questions and answers. It is after two o’clock in the morning. Bloom has brought Stephen back to his house, and in the basement kitchen he is trying to boil water on the stove so he can offer him some cocoa.

This is the point where Stephen notices the laundry hanging above the stove.

“Housebells” are the bells by which people on the upper floors could summon servants in the basement. They were connected to the rooms by cords, so that when someone pulled the cord upstairs, a spring-loaded bell downstairs would ring. Since there are five bells, that would suggest that there are five rooms in Bloom’s house from which a servant could be called.

File:Staff Call Bells (7964118810).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

The Bloom family is imagined as living at No. 7 Eccles Street. The houses on Eccles Street were of the late eighteenth-century Georgian type. A good sense of what such buildings looked like can be seen on the website of the Georgian House Museum, The Number Twenty Nine house on Dublin’s Lower Fitzwilliam Street. Bloom’s house would not have been as grand as that one, of course.

I am not entirely sure about “the chimney pier.” Pier usually means a quay or jetty, but it can also mean a square supporting pillar, so I take it here to mean the boxed-in vertical structure that encloses the chimney rising up from the stove.

It seems that a line has been strung from the recessed space between the side of that structure and the wall, across toward the opposite wall, and that the washing is hanging there.

The four handkerchiefs, since they are described as rectangles, were probably folded in half and hung horizontally over the line.

“Hose” can mean stockings or socks. It has no ordinary plural in this sense, so one pair of hose means one pair. Judging from period advertisements for hose worn with suspenders, these were probably not joined together like tights.

These are hanging “in their habitual position,” that is, with the suspender tops at the top and the feet hanging downward, clipped with one peg where the two stockings overlap in the middle and one peg at each outer end.

I cannot help suspecting that Joyce intended some sexual suggestion in the phrase “three erect wooden pegs.”

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