Editing Leopold Bloom (section)

== Factual antecedents ==
Joyce first started planning a piece in 1906 that he described as "deal[ing] with Mr. Hunter" to be included as the final story in ''[[Dubliners]]'', which he later retitled "Ulysses" in a letter to his brother that year.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Ellmann |first1=Richard |title=Selected Letters of James Joyce |date=1975 |publisher=Viking Press |isbn=0-670-63190-6 |pages=112; 128}}</ref> The protagonist of the piece was apparently to be based on a Dubliner named Alfred H. Hunter, who, according to Joyce's biographer, Richard Ellmann, was rumored around town to have been from a Jewish background and to have an unfaithful, promiscuous wife.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Ellmann |first1=Richard |title=James Joyce |date=1982 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=0-19-503381-7 |pages=161–162}}</ref> The same source that related this reputation to Ellmann also suggested that on the night of 20 June 1904, an intoxicated Joyce approached a young woman standing alone in St. Stephen's Green and spoke to her just before her escort appeared and, feeling Joyce has insulted his date, proceeded to thrash the future author. Sometime after this, according to the Ellmann's source, Hunter appeared on the scene, helped Joyce to his feet, and walked him home. The incident, if accurate, runs parallel to Bloom's rescue of Stephen Dedalus in the closing scene of the Circe episode of ''Ulysses.''

Another Dublin-based model for Bloom, and especially as regards the character's nationalist politics, was the successful entrepreneur and municipal politician Albert L. Altman. Altman owned and operated one of the largest salt depots and distributors in the city during Joyce's entire youth in Ireland and, as noted continuously throughout the period in the Dublin press, was involved in nationalist controversies and Home Rule politics where he was well acquainted with John Joyce, Joyce's father. He was elected to the Dublin Corporation City Council as Usher's Quay Town Councilor from 1901 to 1903 and died in office that final year. Like Bloom, Altman had a son who died in infancy and a father who died by his own hand through accidental poisoning.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Davison |first1=Neil |title=An Irish-Jewish Politician, Joyce's Dublin, and Ulysses: The Life and Times of Albert L. Altman |date=2022 |publisher=University Press of Florida: James Joyce Series |isbn=9780813069555}}</ref>

Another model for Bloom was undoubtedly [[Italo Svevo]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.iseultandbloom.org/articles/bloom.html|title=James Joyce, Italo Svevo & Leopold Bloom|website=iseultandbloom.org}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/james-joyce-and-italo-svevo-the-story-of-a-friendship-1.2781454|title=James Joyce and Italo Svevo: the story of a friendship|newspaper=The Irish Times}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/25486462|title=The Search for Leopold Bloom: James Joyce and Italo Svevo|author=Staley, Thomas F.|year=1964|journal=James Joyce Quarterly|volume=1|issue=4|pages=59–63|jstor=25486462 }}</ref> Svevo was the [[Pen name|nom de plume]] of Hector (Ettore) Schmitz, who was one of Joyce's favorite students when he was a Berlitz English language tutor in Trieste. Schmitz was born and raised a Jew but converted to Catholicism to marry. Joyce had many conversations with him about literature, art, his Jewish background, and Judaism. After Joyce allowed him to read both ''Dubliners'' and a draft of ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'', Schmitz revealed to his tutor that he too was a novelist, although his first published novels had gone unnoticed by the reading public. After Joyce was given these novels and read them, he declared Schmitz to be an overlooked important Italian writer and worked during the course of the rest of their friendship to get his former pupil's works noticed and published. It has been argued as well that the protagonists of Svevo's novels may have influenced Bloom's personality and habits as a Jewish character.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Davison |first1=Neil |title=James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Construction of Jewish Identity: Culture, Biography, and "the Jew" in Modernist Europe |publication-date=1996 |date=1998 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=0-521-55181-1 |pages=155–184}}</ref>

The character's name (and maybe some of his personality) may have been inspired by Joyce's [[Trieste]] acquaintance Leopoldo Popper. Popper was a [[Jews|Jew]] of [[Bohemia]]n descent who had hired Joyce as an English tutor for his daughter Amalia. Popper managed the company of Popper and Blum and it is possible that the name Leopold Bloom was invented by taking Popper's first name and anglicizing the name Blum.<ref>Hughes, Eileen Lanouette (2 February 1968), [https://books.google.com/books?id=NkkEAAAAMBAJ ''The mystery lady of Giacomo Joyce. A newly published work reveals an early Molly Bloom''] Life Magazine.</ref><ref>Partridge, Craig (2016), Juda Loebl Popper of Ostrovec-Lhotka, Bohemia, and His Family, privately printed, pp. 241ff.</ref>