The setting of Dubliners is, logically enough, in and around the city of Dublin, Ireland. Though the capital city of Ireland, the Dublin in which Joyce grew up was a provincial place — far less cosmopolitan than a number of other Western European cities of similar size (Venice, for instance). Unlike France, Spain, and Italy, Ireland had never been a center of continental culture; unlike England and the Netherlands, it had never been a trade hub. Nor, in contrast to then recently united Germany, was Ireland yet industrialized. (In fact, the country would remain almost exclusively rural for decades to come.) It was a kind of third-world nation, really, before the term existed. Though Dublin was a genuinely urban locale, with electric lights and streetcars, competing daily newspapers and even a museum, the city remained fairly unsophisticated at the time when Joyce wrote about it.
To some degree, this was a function of Ireland's geographical remoteness from the rest of the continent in the days before radio and air travel (much less television and the Internet). It is an island off an island (Britain) off the coast of Europe, and therefore somewhat inaccessible. James Joyce himself, however, blamed two other factors for the backwardness of his home city: the Roman Catholic Church and the neighboring country of England.
According to legend, St. Patrick had brought Christianity to Ireland in the Middle Ages; ever since, most Irish have observed a rigorous and rather literal brand of the religion, one that is perhaps more superstitious than the Christianity practiced by French Catholics, for instance. In story after story in Dubliners as well as in the novels he wrote later in his career, Joyce holds the Roman Catholic Church accountable for the failure of the Irish to advance in step with the rest of Europe. He was particularly bitter about the way in which the Church often recruited intellectuals like himself to serve in the priesthood — rather than encouraging them to use their minds in the service of progress, as doctors, scientists, or engineers.
