The 19th-century actor George Holland was born in London and died in New York. But somewhere in between, he spent a short period in Dublin, and it seems to have been where his life took a decisive turn.
He came as a businessman, setting up shop on Crow Street and selling bobbinet lace. This lasted six months. In the meantime, he took to frequenting Crow Street Theatre, and a nearby pub called Peter Kearney’s, when he mixed with the highly contagious theatrical crowd and caught whatever they had.
Closing the shop, he returned to England and spent the next 50 years treading stages, first in Birmingham and London, then across the Atlantic, where he became hugely popular. And in time his fame made an interesting mark on Manhattan, although he had to go to the trouble of expiring first.
Attempting to arrange his funeral in 1870, friends approached an episcopal church at Madison Avenue and 28th Street, where Holland’s widow was a parishioner. The cleric in charge there, however, a Rev Sabine, disapproved of actors and refused to admit the deceased.
So, pressed on where the mourners might go instead, he said there was a “little church around the corner where they do that sort of thing”. Whereupon a friend of Holland’s is said to have replied: “God bless the little church around the corner”. And although officially known, then and now, as the Church of the Atonement, the establishment has ever since been known by the sobriquet.
The incident's notoriety was greatly increased by Mark Twain, who mounted his secular pulpit – a regular column in the monthly Galaxy magazine – to excoriate the clergyman who had turned Holland away.
In general, Twain suggested that Sabine's job as a sky pilot was to fly the departed as far as the Pearly Gates, safely, and leave the rest up to passport control. But picking up on the reverend's complaint that the theatre was not a "moral" force, he delivered a counter-sermon on the instructional virtues of King Lear, Othello, and other plays.
Then, working himself into a paroxysm of indignation, Twain concluded that “nine-tenths of all the kindness and forbearance and Christian charity [...] in the hearts of the American people” had got there via stage dramas, books, and even newspaper columns, “not from the drowsy pulpit”.
In any case, talking of moral lessons, the church that refused Holland's remains has since disappeared, whereas the one that celebrated the funeral still stands. It was declared a New York City Landmark in 1967, made the US register of historic places in 1973, and earned a cameo in Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters (1986).
But never mind all that. The ultimate tribute, arguably, came from the city where Holland had found his vocation. Yes, the Manhattan church is name-checked – twice – in Finnegans Wake, where Joyce calls it "the tin choorch round the coroner".
Crow Street
I was reminded of all this by a New York-visiting Joycean friend, who chanced upon the venue in her travels. And since I could hardly visit Manhattan this week, her email set me strolling through Temple Bar, via Crow Street, to look for traces of the world George Holland briefly inhabited.
Of course Crow Street Theatre has long gone the way of the lace shop – the site is occupied by Urban Outfitters now. And Peter Kearney’s has vanished too, although the name has been (unconsciously) revived in Peadar Kearney’s, round the corner on Dame Street, and also popular with theatrical people.
But I was struck in passing by an odd fact about Temple Bar – that it is entirely devoid of a working church. The last of several that used to operate within its precincts was deconsecrated in 1988. Now an actor in need of a church funeral would have to go around several corners, perhaps into a separate postal district, to find one.
I'm tempted to say the area is all bars and no temples. But in fairness, it still has several theatres too. They include the New Theatre, behind Connolly Books, where the aforementioned Joyce will feature shortly, in a staged Portrait of the Artist, opening June 6th.
And there seems to be a Joycean epidemic in the neighbourhood at the moment. Because across the road from Temple Bar, in Dame Court, Robert Cogan is now staging his one man show, Strolling Through Ulysses.
The venue for its “bawdy” humour is the upstairs bar of the Stag’s Head. And adding to the despair of latter-day Rev Sabines, the show is on Sundays only, at 1pm and 7pm.