In the fourth chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses, the reader meets Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged advertising salesman who is Joyce’s modern equivalent of Odysseus. In these pages, Bloom makes tea and toast for his wife, Molly, then leaves the house to get a kidney for his own breakfast.
In 1950, a Harvard archaeology professor named Phil Phillips went to Dublin to photograph sites mentioned in Joyce’s book. He captured one of the only known photographs of 7 Eccles St.—the Blooms’ fictional home—as an inhabited house.
Philip Phillips, photograph of 7 Eccles St. Dublin, May 1950. EMS 1330/1