The Little Bee Charmer of Henrietta Street

The Kane family, having lost their wife and mother, have to move from a house in a leafy suburb of Dublin in 1911 to a tenement flat in the Henrietta Street of the title.  Eliza has to give up her art classes to look after her father who is losing his sight because of cataracts, and her little brother Jonty. She takes on some of the work he can no longer do illuminating manuscripts in the small workshop.  Life in the tenements is hard but there is a strong community, and there is also the excitement of the circus coming to town and the opportunity for Eliza and Jonty to earn some money for the operation their father needs.  When a tenement crumbles to the ground and lives are lost, the community and the circus family rally round.

Despite the outlines of the story above, this is a warm story of community, although the horrors of rats, communal toilets, not enough food or money, and fathers who drink what money they have away, are depicted clearly for the reader.  But somehow the overwhelming feeling when reading this story, is that of hope as families come together to deal with what life has given them.  Eliza is still mourning her mother but finds the courage not only to accept the awful conditions, which are somewhat alleviated by her father’s friendship with the Pennefeathers, but also to assimilate herself into the life that her new friend Annie experiences.  There is an air of magic about Aunt Ada’s bee charming abilities which Eliza also seems to have acquired from her mother. Jonty is an irrepressible character able to find fun in most things but also is shown to have a soft side when he looks after the small siblings of Tall Joe when he is badly hurt in the tenement accident.  Yes, a lot is glossed over but for the discerning reader the truth is there to see.

In the notes at the end of the book Sarah Webb discloses that Dublin had the worst housing of any city in Britain or Ireland at the time which is truly horrifying.