- Some time in the years before the Battle of
Waterloo a Dublin merchant named Patrick Flynn opened a factory for making starch and
blueing at 53 Back Lane, in the parish of St Nicholas-without-the-City-Walls.
- By now Mr Flynn wold have faded from
all knowledge were it not that his genes contributed in part to the generic make-up of the
author of Ulysses; for he was James Joyce's maternal great-grandfather.
- It was from the Flynn family that
Joyce was to derive most of the details for his long story 'The Dead', in which he
describes these ancestral Dubliners of his under the name Morkan - that name being taken
by him from spirits and tea merchants on Arran Quay in the Dublin of his own day.
- Back Lane, formerly Rochelle
Street, was in the highest and oldest part of Dublin, where the original Viking
settlement of the ninth century had been laid, and around which the medieval English city
subsequently spread out.
(From Biography by Peter Costello)