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Concept
Leopold Bloom
Summary
Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses. His peregrinations and encounters in Dublin on 16 June 1904 mirror, on a more mundane and intimate scale, those of Ulysses/Odysseus in Homer's epic poem: The Odyssey.
When Joyce first started planning a story in 1906 called "Ulysses" to be included in Dubliners, the central character was based on a Dublin acquaintance named Alfred Hunter whom Joyce had met traveling to a funeral in July 1904.
Another model was probably Italo Svevo.
The character's name (and maybe some of his personality) may have been inspired by Joyce's Trieste acquaintance Leopoldo Popper. Popper was a Jew of Bohemian 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.
Bloom is introduced to the reader as a man of appetites:
Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. But most of all, he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
The Bloom character, born in 1866, is the only son of Rudolf Virág (a Hungarian Jew from Szombathely who emigrated to Ireland, converted from Judaism to Protestantism, changed his name to Rudolph Bloom and later died by suicide), and of Ellen Higgins, an Irish Catholic. He is uncircumcised. They lived in Clanbrassil Street, Portobello. Bloom converted to Catholicism to marry Marion (Molly) Tweedy on 8 October 1888. The couple has one daughter, Millicent (Milly), born in 1889; their son Rudolph (Rudy), born in December 1893, died after 11 days. The family lives at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin.
Official source
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