Patrick Comerford
The centenary of the publication of Ulysses in 1922 was celebrated in Dublin with a style and gusto in 2022 that James Joyce undoubtedly would have found endearing and entertaining. One of the many places that attracted attention is 52 Upper Clanbrassil Street, where a plaque claims that it house is the birthplace of Leopold Bloom.
In Episode 17 (‘Ithaca’) of Ulysses, Molly Bloom is searching through the contents of Leopold’s locked drawers when she finds the document that places the Bloom family at 52 Clanbrassil Street at the time of her husband’s birth. She also finds ‘a Yuletide card, bearing on it a pictorial representation of a parasitic plant, the legend Mizpah, the date Xmas 1892, the name of the senders: from Mr + Mrs M. Comerford, the versicle: May this Yuletide bring to thee, Joy and peace and welcome glee.’
But who were the Comerfords who sent a Christmas card to Molly Bloom? With a hint of self-interest, I have wondered why Joyce chose a couple named Comerford to send that card in 1892.
The card shows a recognition by the Comerfords of Bloom’s Jewish background, though by 1892 he had been baptised on three occasions. Christmas is abbreviated to ‘Xmas’, and the name of the season is not spelt out. There is a reference to ‘Yuletide,’ instead of a nativity scene there is a depiction of mistletoe, and the word Mizpah was a common alternative greeting for Jews sending cards in the late Victorian period.
In her soliloquy, Molly Bloom has good reason to remember Christmas 1892-3: it was a harsh winter, and the Grand Canal, separating Clanbrassil Street from Harold’s Cross, had frozen over in February 1893. Molly and Leopold were invited to a party at the Comerfords that winter, and she recalls how she had too many oranges and too much orange and lemonade at a party in the Comerford home in Clanbrassil Street. She was caught short on the way home that night, and, as she recalls, had to use the men’s toilets in a pub, with great personal discomfort.
Any pub between Upper Clanbrassil Street and Lombard Street, where the Blooms then lived, would have been at Leonard’s Corner, the junction of Clanbrassil Street and the South Circular Road, the main crossroads in the area that became known as ‘Little Jerusalem.’ She recalls: ‘O and the stink of those rotten places the night coming home with Poldy after the Comerfords party oranges and lemonade to make you feel nice and watery I went into 1 of them it was so biting cold I couldnt keep it when was that 93 the canal was frozen’ (Penelope).
Why did James Joyce chose the name Comerford for the Blooms’ friends in Ulysses? Apart from coming across my grandfather’s brother, James Comerford, at 62 Lower Clanbrassil Street in Thom’s Directory, was there another reason the family name caught his imagination?
John Henry Raleigh suggests in The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom: Ulysses as Narrative that ‘This Anglo, somewhat toffish name, is meant to suggest, I believe, that the Blooms had some friends rather higher on the social scale than previous or subsequent to their Lombard Street West days.’ The Comerford name may also have attracted Joyce’s attention because he claimed some family portraits had been painted by the Kilkenny-born miniaturist, John Comerford (1771-1832).
What had the Comerfords of Clanbrassil Street to celebrate in early 1893, just after Christmas? In 1893 my great-grandfather James Comerford (1817-1902), a stucco plasterer, his sons, James (1853-1915), Stephen Edward (1867-1921) and Robert (1868-1902), and his nephews, James Comerford (1839-1903) and Robert Comerford (1855-1925), were founding members of the Regular Stucco Plasterers’ Trade Union of the City of Dublin. His nephew James Comerford later lived at 50 Upper Clanbrassil Street, and he and his wife had much to celebrate in 1893 with the birth of their youngest child, Robert Thomas Comerford (1893-1958), at 62 Lower Clanbrassil Street. Perhaps, hoever, this was a little too late for Molly’s post-Christmas party, as Bob was born on 27 April 1893.
Joyce’s choice of 52 Clanbrassil Street as the birthplace of Leopold Bloom has led to the presumption that he was referring to Upper Clanbrassil Street, and not to Lower Clanbrassil Street, which is actually at the heart of Little Jerusalem. Two doors away from No. 52 Upper Clanbrassil Street, a Comerford family was living at No. 50 in 1904, the year in which Joyce sets Bloomsday. My grandfather’s cousin, James Comerford, lived at this No. 52, and this may have prompted placing the plaque at No. 52, claiming this was Bloom’s birthplace.
Although members of the Comerford family were living at No. 50 Upper Clanbrassil Street on the first Bloomsday on Thursday 16 June 1904, my grandfather’s cousin, James Comerford, had died the previous year, 1903, and his widow Ellen was living in the house in 1904.
But what if Rudolph Bloom was born not at No. 52 Upper Clanbrassil Street but at No. 52 Lower Clanbrassil Street, and the plaque was erected on the wrong house? It is more credible to suggest that in Christmas 1892 Joyce is asking us to imagine the Comerford and Bloom families were actually living in Lower Clanbrassil Street, which was then at the heart of the Jewish community in Dublin.
If Joyce actually intended to place Leopold Bloom’s birth at No. 52 Lower Clanbrassil Street, then who are the Comerfords referred to in Ulysses? In the short space of a half century or so, immediate members of this one branch of the Comerford family had addresses in at least 15 houses in Lower and Upper Clanbrassil Street, and many more lived in the warren of streets off Clanbrassil Street, in Little Jerusalem, in Portobello and around Charlemont Street.
If I add their in-laws, their cousins and their nieces and nephews, it must have been impossible then to walk along Clanbrassil Street without meeting and greeting a member of the Comerford family. Family lore recalls it seemed every second person on Lower Clanbrassil Street then was either a Jew or a Comerford.
Joyce used the 1904 edition of Thom’s Directory to locate key Dublin characters and figures in Ulysses. In the 1901 census, N.o 62 Lower Clanbrassil Street was shared by three families: my grandfather’s eldest brother, James Comerford, his wife Lena, and their five children; their cousin, James Comerford, his wife Ellen; and the Keegan family.
Previously, this house had been the home of my grandfather’s cousin, Thomas Comerford, a plasterer, and his wife Mary Anne (Ludlow), who lived there in 1862-72, along with his sister Elizabeth and her husband Denis Cuddy. In 1874 it was the home of another family member, Thomas Comerford and his wife Mary Jane (Cusack). However, by the time of the 1904 edition of Thom’s Directory, 62 Lower Clanbrassil Street was no longer divided into flats. Instead, the house stands out from all the tenements on the street as being occupied by only one family, the home of my grandfather’s brother James Comerford and his family.
By 1911 this James Comerford and his family were sharing 82 Lower Clanbrassil Street with his sister and brother-in-law, Mary and Francis Coleman, and their family, and with Isaac Joffe, a 58-year-old Jewish shopkeeper from Russia and his Russian-born Jewish wife, Hannah.
So, if the Blooms got a Christmas card from the Comerfords in 1892, and Molly was at a party with the Comerford family two months later, it must have been Joyce’s intention to refer to the Comerfords at No. 62 Lower Clanbrassil Street, and not at No. 50 Upper Clanbrassil Street. Today, the site of 62 Lower Clanbrassil Street is the premises of Capital Glass.
As for Leopold Bloom’s birthplace, it was more convenient to erect that plaque in Upper Clanbrassil Street because No. 52 Lower Clanbrassil Street no longer exists: it has long been demolished in road-widening schemes.
Sources and Further reading:
James Joyce, Ulysses (various editions).
John Henry Raleigh, The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom: Ulysses as Narrative (Berkeley: University California Press, 1977)
‘TMolly Bloom’s Christmas Card: where Joycean fiction meets a real-life family’ is published in Christmas and the Irish: a miscellany, ed Salvador Ryan (Dublin: Wordwell Books, 2023, 403 pp, €25, ISBN: 978-1-913934-93-4), pp 151-155, with the photograph of 50 Upper Clanbrassil Street on p 155.
The list of contributors includes this note on p 400:
Patrick Comerford is an Anlican priest living in retirement near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. He is a former adjunct assistant professor in Trinity College Dublin
