Bloomsday Diary, June 16th 1904

Evening Telegraph 16th June 1904, Title Page
© Dublin City Public Libraries

To the majority of people living in Ireland on 16th June 1904, Bloomsday was probably just an ordinary day, no better and no worse than the ones that preceded and followed it. To others, it might have been a day of great importance; the day on which they lost a loved one, or in contrast, the day on which they found the love of their life, as Joyce did when he came upon Nora Barnacle sauntering down the streets of Dublin. The purpose of this section of the site is to try to give a feeling of what it might have been like to be alive on that day. The fourteen entries cover a whole range of people from all over the country, ranging in age from the young to the old, and coming from different social classes. While all the characters in the Diary Entries are fictional, their lives, circumstances and attitudes are based on facts.

If you are interested in finding out more about the people who lived during this period of Irish history, a list of the sources from the Dublin and Irish Local Studies Collections is available. The most effective way, however of getting a sense of Dublin (and indeed life) in 1904 in all its diversity, is to go directly to Ulysses, the masterpiece of the man who made June 16th famous.