The original handwritten manuscript of Ulysses lives in Philadelphia. Every June 16, the Rosenbach Museum celebrates the fact — with readings, Edwardian costumes, and a gorgonzola sandwich.
Philadelphia has the strongest material claim on Bloomsday of any American city: the handwritten manuscript of Ulysses, all 1,500 pages in Joyce's own hand, lives at the Rosenbach Museum on Delancey Place. Every June 16, the city reads from it.
Philadelphia received its Irish immigrants earliest of any American city — the Scots-Irish arrived before the Revolution, and the Catholic Irish followed in force after the Famine. By 1850, Philadelphia's Irish-born population was the third largest in the United States. The neighbourhoods they built — Kensington, Fishtown, South Philadelphia — are still recognisably shaped by that migration, even as demographics have shifted.
The city's relationship with Irish culture runs deep and is not merely sentimental. The Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, founded in Philadelphia in 1771, is the oldest Irish-American organisation in continuous operation. The Philadelphia St. Patrick's Day parade is one of the oldest in the country. Bloomsday, in this context, is not an import — it is an extension of a cultural relationship that predates the United States.
The Rosenbach Museum on Delancey Place holds one of the world's most significant Joyce collections — including the original handwritten manuscript of Ulysses. Every year it hosts one of the most substantial Bloomsday events outside Dublin: a full dramatic reading of Ulysses, performers in Edwardian costume, a gorgonzola sandwich on the menu, and an exhibition of the manuscript itself. The Rosenbach Bloomsday has been running for more than 40 years and draws audiences from across the Eastern Seaboard.
The Irish Memorial at Front and Chestnut Streets and the Irish-American community of Fishtown occasionally organise Bloomsday walks through the historic Irish neighbourhoods of Philadelphia. The walks focus on the Irish immigration story — the Famine arrivals, the neighbourhood building, the parish churches — and situate Joyce's Dublin in the context of the diaspora that arrived in Philadelphia.
The original handwritten manuscript of Ulysses — all 1,500 pages, in Joyce's own hand — lives in Philadelphia. A. S. W. Rosenbach acquired it in the 1920s and it has never left the city. Philadelphia's claim on Bloomsday is therefore unusually material: the physical object from which all editions of the novel descend is in a townhouse on Delancey Place, two miles from the Irish neighbourhoods where Famine refugees arrived 170 years ago.
This is not a coincidence that escapes Philadelphians who think about it. The original of the novel that defines Irish literary identity lives in a city built partly by Irish immigrants. Every June 16, the Rosenbach makes that connection visible.
The Irish-American families of Philadelphia and the wider Delaware Valley carry surnames that trace directly to the counties Joyce wrote about. Kelly, Murphy, McNally, Dolan, Moran, Gallagher — each has an Irish townland of origin, and each arrived in Philadelphia through the same emigration that depopulated those townlands in the mid-nineteenth century.
Leopold Bloom's Bloomsday lunch — a gorgonzola sandwich on brown bread, washed down with a glass of Burgundy — is served at the Rosenbach every June 16. The sandwich appears in Ulysses in the "Lestrygonians" chapter, when Bloom stops at Davy Byrne's pub on Duke Street, Dublin, and orders what Joyce describes with characteristic precision: "Gorgonzola, have you? Yes, sir."
The Rosenbach's version is served in the garden of the townhouse, while actors perform passages from the novel. It is one of the most specifically Joycean experiences available outside Ireland — and it is in Philadelphia.
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