Back Issues / 2007

Leopold Bloom, (though “born” at No. 52, Clanbrassil Street, Dublin in May 1866), is the archetypal immigrant to Ireland, with his paternal roots in a different culture and religion, living at a remove from the accepted social and political outlook of his time.   The international fame of an Irish fictional character is all the more interesting because he was created in an era when Irish life was characterised by emigration. 

As the tall blind man, holding a white stick, waited for assistance to cross a busy Dublin street, he remarked “It’s harder to get help doing this nowadays; people are more brusque.”   A British visitor, who used to live in Dublin, commented on the decline in the courtesy that used to be a part of Irish life. A radio commercial features a young woman with a supposedly enviable lifestyle: the gym, weekends away, no time to link up with an old friend; she takes a vitamin supplement to give her an enviable amount of energy, but she uses that energy to keep moving rather than maintain social contacts.

The Realities of Irish Life by William Stuart Trench (1808-1872) became an immediate publishing success in 1868.. Given his background, as a very controversial land agent in Ulster, Munster and Leinster, his opinions on the Great Famine, emigration, religion and almost every other aspect of life in Ireland, provoked wildly different reactions, but he knew how to attract the reading public. Part of Trench’s argument rested on his conviction that nothing in Ireland is quite as it seems.

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