Worried about sunburn after her trip to the beach,
Miss Douce recalls a trip to the chemist's: "I asked that old
fogey in Boyd's for something for my skin." The two barmaids
immediately become convulsed by gales of laughter about the
sexually repellent superannuated counter-monkey, making the name
of the shop nearly irrelevant, but commentators have identified
two possible pharmacies to which Joyce could be referring, one
near the Ormond Hotel and one in the northern suburb of
Drumcondra. More to the textual point, it is worth noting that
this is the second time in the novel that someone has gone to a
druggist for skin lotion.
In
Surface and Symbol, Robert Martin Adams suggests that
Lydia is "thinking of a clerk in the North City branch of
Boileau and Boyd's (late Boyd, Samuel), at 46 Mary Street,"
which would have been only a few blocks away from the Ormond
(12). Gifford notes that
Thom's directory identifies
this business as "wholesale druggists, manufacturing chemists,
and color merchants." But he observes that "it could as easily
be James Boyd, druggist, at 21 Grattan Parade, Drumcondra,"
since Miss Kennedy lives in Drumcondra and both women are
familiar with the stuffy old coot.
Druggists in Joyce's day compounded not only pharmaceutical
products but also soaps, lotions, and perfumes, and some of
those formulas could be adjusted to individual customers'
preferences. In
Lotus Eaters Bloom goes into "
Sweny's in Lincoln Place" to get
some more of the skin lotion that Molly likes, realizes that
"the recipe is in the other trousers," and thinks, "O, he can
look it up in the prescriptions book." Like Molly, Miss Douce
clearly prefers a chemist's carefully balanced (and, perhaps,
individually tailored) concoction to anything she could make
herself. Miss Kennedy asks, "Did you try the borax with the
cherry laurel water?," adding, "Try it with the glycerine." But
her coworker disdains such amateurish concoctions: "Those things
only bring out a rash."
