Hosty

Hosty is an ill-starred, impoverished beach busker whose ballad about HCE escapes its maker and becomes a public instrument of ridicule. The narrative first finds him contemplating suicide amid homelessness and despair; after a night of drinking and company, it recasts him as the author and singer of a communal rhyme. Its mock-heroic refrain, multiplying names, printed circulation, and repeated performances turn an individual’s makeshift song into a public legend.

Identity and Circumstances

Hosty is introduced as a beach busker without a secure home or means of support, “sans rootie and sans scrapie,” starved and melancholic. He lies on a makeshift bed, grieving “over everything in general,” and imagines obtaining a pistol so he can kill himself. His desperation has a long history: for eighteen years, with Madam Gristle’s help, he has tried unsuccessfully to secure treatment in a succession of hospitals, from Sir Patrick Dun’s and Sir Humphrey Jervis’s to Saint Kevin’s in the Adelaide. The account makes material precarity inseparable from his state of mind; he is not introduced as a celebrated poet but as a man near the edge of survival.

Hosty sleeps among fellow displaced people, including Lisa O’Deavis and Roche Mongan, in a shared arrangement of “tumblerbunks.” The social world around him is as improvised as his lodging. Yet the narrative’s account of his condition is unstable and comic in its language: his later revival follows “a goodnight’s rave and rumble” and a morning with his companions, after which he is “not the same man.” The shift from despair to performance is abrupt, a change in condition and public role rather than a securely explained recovery.

From Night Shelter to Public Performance

After sleeping at a lodging house called The Barrel, Hosty and his “bedroom suite” get up and cross the cold city to the sound of a crewth fiddle. Their morning includes a stop at a pawnbroker to redeem the singer’s false teeth and a visit to a house of call at Cujas Place. The company grows as they drink and celebrate; the passage names a “decent sort” among them and places them in licensed premises before they emerge wiping their mouths on their sleeves. These concrete, disorderly preparations precede the song’s public life: performance rises out of a night of homelessness, drinking, companionship, and street movement.

The account calls Hosty the maker of the “rann” and presents its arrival as a collective occasion. A crowd gathers beneath a monument, filling the available space and drawing people from across social ranks and regions. Young Dubliners, working people, professionals, clergy, ladies in chairs, and travelers appear in the audience’s sprawling catalogue. The scene makes the ballad’s reception more than a private exchange between singer and listeners: it is staged as a meeting of the city and, imaginatively, of the nations. Hosty’s song can address this crowd because its subject has already become public property.

Making the Ballad

The performance begins with a sequence of competing names for its target. Some call him Vike or Mike, others Llyn or Phin, and still others Lug Bug Dan Lop, Lex, Lax, Gunne, or Guinn; the singer’s refrain finally settles on Persse O’Reilly, while also declaring that otherwise he has no name at all. Identity is thus generated as part of the joke: HCE is at once recognizable and endlessly renamed. The crowd participates in the performance’s call-and-response, asking whether it has heard and where it has heard, while Hosty is hailed as the man who can rhyme the “rann.”

The ballad’s opening recasts its subject as Humpty Dumpty, who falls “with a roll and a rumble” and curls up beside the Magazine Wall. Once “King of the Castle,” he is now kicked about like a rotten parsnip and faces an order sending him from Green Street to Mountjoy Prison. The song turns fall, humiliation, and public punishment into a memorable popular refrain. It does not merely state an accusation: its nursery-rhyme figure, comic degradation, and chantable chorus make the scandal portable and repeatable.

Other fragments keep the performance open and shifting. The listeners are urged to “change that shirt” and tell Hosty to rhyme again; another cue calls for him to lift the song, while a further passage begins a competing account of HCE’s attempt to woo a maid. The text supplies versions and interruptions rather than a single, bounded recital. Hosty’s authorship is consequently both explicit—the refrain names him as the man to rhyme the song—and embedded in a crowd performance whose voices, cues, and retellings continually reshape it.

Circulation and Repetition

The song does not remain beneath the monument. A rough woodcut and printed sheet carry its “secret” along roads and through communities, from archway to lattice and from hand to ear. The narration imagines it traveling across a broad, geographically dispersed world, while the later account describes the ballad’s reach from Malin Head to Clear Island and Carnsore Point. Hosty’s work acquires an afterlife independent of the moment when he sang it: listeners buy it, carry it, and pass its words along.

That circulation also multiplies the social consequences of the song. The later narrative links its route to the listeners whose pockets are cleaned and ribs “ransomed,” presenting popular entertainment as an economy as well as a performance. Mock-indignation meetings continue to call HCE names, and crowds repeat insults about him and his family. The public shaming does not resolve into a final, authoritative account of the alleged offense; instead, the ballad feeds a cycle in which accusation, ridicule, performance, and renewed outrage sustain one another.

Hosty’s song is repeatedly recalled in altered surroundings. It is associated with music and a crowd beneath a monument, with a printed woodcut, and with a far-reaching chain of buyers and tellers. Later, a catalogue of children’s games includes “Battle of Waterloo” and “Writing a Letter to Punch,” placing shared songs and play in a broader culture of repetition and popular memory. Another passage describes dances and tunes persisting through changes of money, seasons, and generations. Across these returns, Hosty’s ballad belongs to a world where cultural forms survive by being performed again, not by remaining fixed.

Narrative Role

Hosty joins two kinds of instability: his personal circumstances can turn from suicidal despair to a raucous morning with companions, while his song shifts among refrains, names, fragments, and audiences. He remains socially marginal, but his performance gains a reach unavailable to him as an isolated, homeless singer. The contrast gives the ballad its force: a man with little security or authority becomes the source of words that can travel widely and expose a powerful figure to communal mockery.

The narrative does not offer a settled portrait of Hosty separate from the noisy transmission of his work. His role is at once maker, performer, and name within the refrain that celebrates the maker; the printed sheet and its later retellings extend that role beyond any one scene. The ballad’s authority comes not from a verified account but from its ability to gather voices, turn scandal into rhythm, and circulate. Hosty therefore embodies the text’s interest in how public reputation is made: not once, by a definitive telling, but repeatedly, through song, crowd, print, and rumor.