“A Free Breakfast Table”, a short story by James Connolly

On 15 June 1895, the Labour Leader published a short story set in Dublin about a homeless man in search of a meal. It was entitled, “A Free Breakfast Table” and published under the name, Brehon.

The story is a humorous tale with serious undertones, relating to class and politics in the city. Its main significance today, however, is that it was written by James Connolly.

The piece, which used a previously unknown pseudonym, is one of 18 lost works rediscovered and republished for the first time in The Lost and Early Writings of James Connolly 1889-1898.

At the time of its publication Connolly was living in Edinburgh. He had worked as a street cleaner for Edinburgh Council but had taken time off to stand for election – first for a council seat, then for a school board position. He was unsuccessful on both counts and the council, it seems, declined to rehire him.

Connolly took this as an opportunity to devote all of his time to activism, relying on an unreliable income from occasional party work, public talks, lectures, and journalism. This included six pieces for Labour Leader under the name of Brehon: four works of fiction, a political manifesto, and a letter to the editor.

Together they contain four distinct phrases which identify Connolly as the author, one of which, “Malahide codfish waiting for the tide to come in” is in “A Free Breakfast Table.”

“Having a mouth like a Malahide cod” was a Dublin expression, often used as a synonym for surprise. Connolly used a variation of it in Workers’ Republic in 1898: “ We just stood around them with our mouths open like a Malahide codfish waiting for the tide to come in.”

There are very few instances of the phrase in print, although it has remained part of the oral tradition in Dublin. The exact phrasing here, though, in particular the use of “codfish” instead of “cod”, is unique to Connolly, his very own literary fingerprint. The only other example of its use anywhere is by Brehon in Labour Leader.

Despite the public perception, the bulk of Connolly’s work has not been publicly available. Indeed, only 46 percent of his known writings has been republished since 1916 – the rest has remained hidden in the archives.

I spent the past two years transcribing all of these works – around 800,000  words – which gave me a searchable file to identify key words and phrases used by Connolly and him alone. The lost works rediscovered are a direct result of this process.

There is a body of work to be done to produce, finally, Connolly’s complete works. Lost and Early Writings is the first volume in this process.

It reveals an intelligent, articulate, and very witty young writer, fond of Shakespeare, Dickens, Whitman, and the Bible – all befitting a Marxist preacher on the streets of Edinburgh in the final years of the nineteenth century.

A Free Breakfast Table (1895)

By James Connolly

This is not a political fulmination, exhortation, or oration. It is a brief examination of the situation in which the hero found himself after two months’ semi-starvation.

It is not written in blank verse, nor in flowing Whitmanesque.¹

It has a hero – a noble-minded, generous, whole-souled, ragged, and hungry hero.

He was in Dublin, the capital of Ireland, bounded on the west by the emigrant ship, on the east by the House of Commons, and on the south by Cork, known to the initiated as God’s own town and the devil’s own people, and on the north by Derry, the Maiden City, whose inhabitants to a man would die in the last ditch in defence of Protestant ascendency, provided always the ditch was a clean one and that the rebellion could be arranged for evening, after work was over.

Dublin is a great city. There the very air is redolent of patriotism and rebellion and Dublin Bay herring. There the Nationalist alderman suns himself on the steps of the Mansion House and the Nationalist worker out of work sleeps off his hunger on the steps of Nelson’s Pillar. There the aristocratic Irish beauty, half naked and wholly unashamed, throngs to the Viceregal ball, “where low-born bareness wafts perfume to pride,”² while Irish matrons in the service of Irish employers crouch with advertising boards in their grasp beneath the lamp-posts in their leading thoroughfares. There the form of Tom Moore, the sweetest singer of Irish music, stands before the world in the ugliest statue the hand of man has ever formed³. There the unskilled labourer, enthusiastic in the cause of freedom, enrolls himself a member of the same political association as his employers, who are paying him his sixteen-shilling wage. There you have streets named after the oppressors of the people – Marlborough Street, the site of Beresford’s riding school, in which the 98 rebels were flogged and tortured, and where on each succeeding Sunday the clink of the collection-plate at the pro-cathedral can be heard arising like silvery music upon the summer air. There you have Dan O’Connell’s statue, with his coat buttoned upon the wrong side, and that of Lord Gough’s horse without shoes on its feet. There you have Christ Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral restored by the rival efforts of two dealers in strong drink. There you have the stately Liffey, the silvery Dodder, and the commerce-laden canal, the mention of which recalls my wandering pen. Our hero arose from his couch upon the banks of the canal, and removing the hay from his hair, dodged the watch-dog, shut his ears to the seductive wailings of the rent provider and landlords’ friend, yclept the pig, scrambled out upon Drumcondra Bridge and looked around him⁴.

It was a lovely morning, nature smiled upon him – and the policeman moved him on. Such is the way of fate and the instructions of the inspector.

The turf-laden barges sailed placidly along the bosom of the canal; the waters reflected the blue dome of the heavens above.

“All nature seemed smiling by moorland and lea.”⁵

And he was hungry – desperately hungry. So he wandered forth toward the great city, and there arose within him thoughts of sweet and succulent food. Thoughts of the capabilities of human enjoyment and the powers of the human stomach. Thoughts of the time when in his home in the Black North he had feasted right royally upon potatoes and salt, washed down with a “naggin of buttermilk,” and had scorned the wealth of kings. Thoughts of the feasts he had seen and heard of, of what he would do if his guardian angel were then and there to endow him with a fortune, how he would sample the contents of the baker’s window he had just passed, how he would revel in clearing of its contents that steaming tray of delicacies just being carried into that refreshment saloon. Thoughts of rebellion, on-rushing and triumphant, of hungry mobs sacking the palaces of the rich and casting out the robbers; thoughts of tables spread with good cheer and the outcasts and down-trodden of the city installed in the place of the oppressors of the people; thoughts of the coal porters from the quay and the denizens of Montgomery Street rioting in the mansions of Merrion Square, and holding levees at the castle; thoughts of the ponds of Stephen’s Green drained of water and filled with wine, of the rookeries transformed into luscious edibles and given away to the people. Thoughts, in fact, of every kind an empty stomach could force upon a weakened brain.

And on he walked, and unconsciously his feet kept pace with his imagination, and in the midst of his reveries he heeded not the stares of the passers-by, who occasionally turned to look after the swiftly moving, hungry, ragged outcast.

On he rushed, past the Rotunda, along O’Connell Street, past the offices of the National League, under the shadow of the British flag flying from the topmost point of Nelson’s monument, past the Post Office, Abbey Street, Bachelors’ Walk, across Carlisle Bridge⁶, on towards the Bank.

Beauty, wealth, fashion, pomp, pageantry, loyalty, cant, flunkeyism, pride, piety – what are they all to a man who is hungry? And he was hungry.

For three months he had looked in vain for employment. For three months he had beseeched a situation from those sterling Nationalist employers who denounce landlord tyranny in the country and in the towns use the misery of its victims to drive down wages to starvation point. For two months he had lived on the charity of the Mendicity institution⁷.

He was hungry, desperately hungry. Even the thought of work had left him in the overpowering desire for food. He reached the Bank, be essayed to cross the street; as he did so there rounded the corner of Grafton Street a company of red-coated soldiers on their way to relieve their comrades on duty in some of the garrison guards. For a moment the bright, flashing bayonets of the soldiers riveted the attention of our hero, as with shouldered arms they marched past the sentry who guards her Britannic Majesty’s treasures at the Bank. Then he stepped forward again and stopped. For, lo! there on the ground before him lay a coin – yellow, glittering, shining, stamped with the counterfeit presentment of the old lady⁸ who does us the honour to rule over us. A coin to all appearance the equivalent of a workman’s weekly wage.⁹

Have you seen a ragged street arab¹⁰ clutch at a crust and thrust it into the recesses of his clothing lest his bigger playmates should claim a share of the spoil? Then you have an idea of the manner in which our hero seized that coin, hiding it at once in his pocket from the prying eyes of the policeman; into his pocket, while his fingers carefully felt it over to ascertain whether it had indeed that jagged, notched edge accompanying a golden coin. It had. Eureka! Here was a fortune. Feasting galore, a warm bed to lie in, a fire to sit beside, breakfast, dinner, and supper for a week to come.

Straightway he turns upon his heel, along Dame Street, up Cork Hill, past the castle, along Thomas Street, and dives headlong into a third-rate eating-house he had known in his palmy days.

“It’s a fine mornin’, sir.”

“Two slices of bread and butter, two cups of tea, and half a pound of cooked rashers (bacon).”

“Yes, sir; yes, sir.”

“An’ have you any taters ready. No? Then get me a plate of taters an’ a bowl of broth, quick; I’m starving. An’, holy Heaven, what kind of rashers is that to put before a hungry man; an’ bread, sure I could read Tim Healy’s speeches through it. Give me that plate of fancy bread out of the window, an’ for God’s sake don’t stand there staring with your mouth open like a Malahid codfish waiting for the tide to come in.¹¹ Get your taters done, or I’ll be finished with this mouthful before you are ready. Eaten half-a-crown’s worth already, you say. I don’t care if I had eaten five shillings’ worth, ma’am. I can afford it this blessed morning, thanks be to God. Look here, ma’am, and let me dazzle your eyes and comfort your ould heart; for although I’ve eaten your mouldy bread and drunk your watery tea before paying for it, it’s mesilf¹² can so drive away your cares with a sight of the face of the widow woman we neither love nor honour¹³ – at least, except on the back or front, which ever you like to call it, of a yellow sovereign like this one.”

So saying, our hero suited the action to the word, and drawing his hand from his pocket slapped down upon the table the coin – a brand new, shining, polished halfpenny¹⁴.

Dublin is a great city.

1. In a letter to the Edinburgh Evening Post in 1894, Connolly cites Whitman as one of “a few whose names rise to the lips of every educated man or woman like a litany when thinking on the bright galaxy of genius whose rays shed a lustre on European literature today, and every one of them is a confirmed and avowed socialist.” See “Socialism v Individualism,” Edinburgh Evening Post, 8 August 1894. ↩︎
2. From “An Ode in Imitation of Alcaeus,” by Sir William Jones (1746–1794), also known by its first line, “What Constitutes a State?” Connolly slightly misquotes the original line which reads: “Where low-browed baseness wafts perfume to pride.’ The misquotation may be intentional, with ‘low-born bareness’ Connolly’s own description of the attendees at the Viceregal ball. ↩︎
3. Thomas Moore’s statue is at the junction of College St and Westmoreland St. Erected in 1857 it was poorly received with the Irish Builder describing it as a ‘hideous caricature of our national bard.’ See Freeman’s Journal, 9 September 1863, p.4. ↩︎
4. ‘Yclept’ is an archaic adjective meaning ‘by the name of’; the word represents Old English gecleopod, past participle of cleopian ‘call’. Its meaning here is uncertain, but could signify being called or shouted at. ↩︎
5. I have been unable to source this quote. ↩︎
6. Carlisle Bridge was built in 1794 and rebuilt by the Dublin Ports and Docks Board in 1880, when it was renamed O’Connell Bridge by the City council. The use of “Carlisle Bridge” seems an anachronism, although a search of newspapers for the period shows that the old name was still in use in the 1880s and 1890s. ↩︎
7. Connolly published a short story, “The Mendicity and its Guests,” in Workers’ Republic, 27 August 1898. ↩︎
8. Queen Victoria. ↩︎
9. The hero believes he has found a gold sovereign, value one old pound, or 240 pence. ↩︎
10. A homeless child; a street urchin. ↩︎
11. Malahide codfish. Connolly re-used this line in “Home Thrusts,” Workers’ Republic, 27 August 1898, 1. “We just stood around them with our mouths open like a Malahide codfish waiting for the tide to come in.” ↩︎
12. Meself. ↩︎
13. Queen Victoria’s image on the coin. ↩︎
14. The punchline of the story. The halfpenny was the second-lowest coin in value, the lowest being a farthing. It was made of copper which had, when new, a shiny appearance. The hero, in his famished state, mistook its shine for that of a gold sovereign. He has already eaten half-a-crown’s worth of food, or 30 old pence. ↩︎