Museum of Literature Ireland

MoLI opened in 2019 in Newman House on St Stephen's Green, the original home of the Catholic University of Ireland, where Gerard Manley Hopkins taught classics and died in 1889 and where James Joyce was a student between 1899 and 1902. The name is also a nod to Molly Bloom. Its two headline objects are Joyce's: Copy No. 1 of the first edition of Ulysses, printed in Paris in 1922, and the Copybook, an early notebook containing drafts of material that fed into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Around them the museum covers Irish writing broadly rather than as a canon of statues - contemporary as well as historical, in Irish as well as English, with audio, film and rotating exhibitions rather than dense text panels. The Georgian rooms themselves, including eighteenth-century plasterwork, are part of the visit, and there is a garden and cafe behind.

History

The idea of a literary centre at Newman House, the original home of University College Dublin, came from a conversation at Bewley's Café between the college and the National Library of Ireland; the project began in 2012, design work followed from 2014, and the museum, a partnership of the two, opened in September 2019 (Wikipedia, Museum of Literature Ireland).

What's there

• Copy No. 1 of Ulysses - the first edition, Paris 1922.
• The Copybook - Joyce's early notebook feeding into Portrait.
• The Newman House rooms - Georgian interiors with eighteenth-century plasterwork.
• The broad approach - contemporary and Irish-language writing alongside the canon.

When to go

Any season; indoors. Weekday mornings are quietest. Two hours covers the galleries, more with the garden and rotating exhibitions.

Things to know

Ticketed, and more expensive than the free national museums nearby. It is interpretation-led with relatively few objects. The headline Joyce items are small and displayed under low light.

Nearby

St Stephen's Green is at the door; the National Gallery and Merrion Square are east.

Key facts