The Martello Tower is now a museum.

Today in Literature:

On this day in 1904, twenty-two-year-old James Joyce moved into the Martello Tower in Sandycove, outside Dublin, with his friend Oliver St. John Gogarty. Joyce only stayed with Gogarty for a week — there were disagreements, and in October Joyce and Nora Barnacle left for Europe — but their relationship and the Tower setting would become the opening chapter of Ulysses. The Sandycove Martello Tower was one of many built by the British army a century earlier as a defense system against a Napoleonic invasion — thus Stephen Dedalus (Joyce) is able to joke that Buck Mulligan (Gogarty) pays his rent to “the secretary of state for war.”

The events of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses took place in Dublin on June 16, 1904.

Marcella Riordan performs Mollie Bloom’s soliloquy.