Podcast: Albert Altman and Leopold Bloom

John Dorney and Cathal Brennan speak to Vincent Altman O’Connor and Neil Davison about Albert Altman, the possible real life inspiration for James Joyce’s character Leopold Bloom. First broadcast on the Irish History Show.

Albert Altman was a Dublin businessman and politician. Born into a Jewish family in 1853 as Albert Liebes Lascar Altman in what was then Prussian ruled Poland, he immigrated to Dublin as a young child. The family developed a salt business on Dublin quays, hence Altman’s nickname in the city; ‘Altman the Saltman’.

Like Bloom, James Joyce’s character, in his famous novel Ulysses, Altman’s father died by suicide and like Bloom, Altman married an Irish Catholic woman, Susan O’Reilly from Cork (though after he death from cancer he remarried a Belfast Protestant Victoria Corbett).

Altman himself developed sympathies for Irish nationalism and was active in the Irish National League from the 1880s and later the United Irish League (UIL).

He was elected to Dublin Corporation as a UIL candidate in 1901, campaigning against corruption and for the taking fo the tramway system into public ownership. He was part of a group who refused to welcome the British King Edward VII to Dublin in 1903. He died shortly afterwards from side effects of diabetes.

We discuss his life and times and parallels with the fictional character Bloom, with Joyce scholar Neil Davison of Oregan State University and Vincent Altman O’Connor, a descendant of Albert Altman.

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