An Irish Diary

On the trail of the Hunter – Terence Killeen on the shadow of Leopold Bloom

An Irishman’s Diary

James Joyce. Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images

Terence Killeen
Sun Jan 23 2022 - 19:01

Strange are the ways of James Joyce scholarship. Stranger still, sometimes, are the byways.

Some years ago I was researching the life and history of Alfred Hunter, an obscure Dubliner who had something to do with Joyce's initial conception of the character who ultimately became Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses. In those days, before the digitisation of the 1901 and 1911 censuses, it was a bit of a wild goose chase, but, as that veteran researcher Peter Costello had found before me, there were some clues. A death certificate, dated 1926, showed that Hunter, like Bloom, had been an advertisement canvasser – a not insignificant fact, surely. The cert also stated that he was married, but to whom it did not say. However, a death notice in The Irish Times stated that he was "deeply regretted by his sorrowing wife, Marian B. Hunter". So Hunter's wife was called Marian, as was Molly Bloom (Marion, actually) – again, a not insignificant fact.

Given they were married, it seemed likely that documentary evidence of this marriage would appear. A plausible marriage certificate did turn up, one which had also come to Peter Costello's attention. This certificate showed that an Alfred H. Hunter married a Margaret Cummins, of Castlewood Avenue, Rathmines, in Rathmines Catholic Church in 1898.

There were difficulties with this, not least that I already knew that Alfred Hunter's wife was called Marian. Nor would one expect them to be living on the southside, since Joyce's Hunter was very much a northside figure. So when I first wrote about this, in the Dublin James Joyce Journal of 2008, I was driven to the desperate expedient of suggesting that Margaret Cummins had changed her first name in order to advance her supposed singing or acting career. All very imaginative and all entirely wrong.

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But this was the only marriage certificate apparent, and therefore I had to fit it in, somehow, with what I already knew. In the meantime the digitised 1911 census – only – had become available and this showed no other Alfred H. Hunter who might have been an alternative candidate for the marriage certificate.

Subsequently, with further research and the release of the digitised 1901 census, things became much clearer. The marriage of the "real" Alfred H. Hunter was found – he and his Irish wife Marian were for some reason married in London – and the availability of the 1901 census confirmed that there were two Alfred H. Hunters in Dublin at that time – Alfred Hiram Hunter of Castlewood Avenue and Alfred Henry, complete with wife Marian, at that time living in Lower Mount Street.

By the 1911 census, Alfred Hiram Hunter and his wife Margaret had vanished; they were no longer living in Castlewood Avenue or anywhere else in Dublin that I could see. The house was that of Margaret Cummins's mother, Annie Cummins. This absence was part of the reason for my earlier confusion. Curiously, though, there was a Hunter still living there. This was Anne Hunter, clearly the daughter of Alfred and Margaret. She was also to be found in the 1901 census, at that time aged one, so of course she was 11 in 1911– as old as the century.

Her continuing presence in the house, when her parents were missing, was intriguing. But I had no way of knowing what happened. Aspects of the Alfred Hiram case remained tantalising from a Joycean point of view – the name "Hiram" sounded Jewish, linking him to Bloom, and could little Anne correspond to the Blooms' daughter, Milly Bloom? But the much stronger claims of Alfred Henry Hunter, the ad canvasser, clearly won out, and I no longer pursued the Castlewood Avenue connection.

Then, in 2017, I heard from Mrs Kendal Shand, of Cape Town, South Africa. She is the great-granddaughter of Alfred Hiram Hunter, and informed me that he and his wife emigrated from Ireland to South Africa. It must have happened soon after the 1901 census, because Alfred arrived in time to fight on the British side in the Boer War. This was unusual for an Irishman – no Major John McBride, he – because support for the Boers was very high in Ireland, as Ulysses testifies. (Mrs Shand confirms that Alfred was – and the family remains – staunchly Catholic.) With him went, of course, his wife Margaret nee Cummins. With them did not go their daughter Annie.

Margaret died very soon after arriving in South Africa, and, as Mrs Shand speculates, likely plans to bring Annie out subsequently were abandoned. Alfred Hunter started a new family out there and apparently Annie just fell by the wayside. Mrs Shand knew her great-grandfather, who lived to be 89, as a kindly, warm-hearted man. He died in Potchefstroom, Transvaal.

Naturally, the discovery of Annie’s abandonment came as a shock to her. (I would not myself be in any rush to judgement given the way things were at the time – such a situation was not uncommon – and Annie was left in the care of her grandmother, not just by the side of the road.) Her subsequent fate is unknown – possibly the 1926 census, the next one, due to be released in 2026, will tell us more, or just maybe there is someone out there who knows something about her.

Annie Hunter, then, is a person outside the charmed circle of James Joyce "mentions". She will not appear in any book or online resource about these matters. The world that this writer inhabited, the people who found their way into the book, exist in this charmed circle, more and more. But it is also good that someone whose link to this work is purely contingent, who appears at all purely as a result of an error of attribution, should also have her small memorial, her small place in the sun.

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