Hard hat

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People did not go out in public without head coverings in 1904, and the novel mentions many types of men's hats: the silk top hat favored by the upper classes, worn by Martin Cunningham, Father Conmee, Professor Maginni, and others; the jaunty straw boater worn by Blazes Boylan on June 16 and Bloom on the day he proposed to Molly on Howth Head; Buck Mulligan's similarly jaunty panama; Stephen's wide soft Paris student hat, expressive of bohemian nonconformity; the flat cap worn by menial workers, boys, and men at leisure (Bloom imagines buying a nice tweed one to wear while gardening in his suburban Flowerville paradise); Lenehan's "yachting cap" (Joyce himself wore one of these as a young man); the vaguely military uniform caps worn by porters; and the "peaked cap" or "peak cap" that likewise imitated military headgear. Probably a few Dubliners sported fedoras or homburgs in 1904, and then there were unclassifiable creations like the "small felt hat" worn by Davy Stephens. (Women's hat styles too receive many mentions in Ulysses, starting with the daringly mannish tam that Bloom has given Milly for her birthday.)

Clearly there was a lot of variety in Dublin headgear, but one type of men's hat would have stood out as prevalent, respectable, self-effacing, normative. The bowler, a hard felt hat with a rounded crown, typically black, was invented in 1849 by London hat-makers Thomas and William Bowler for Thomas Coke, the first earl of Leicester. Coke wanted a hat which, unlike the top hats of the early 19th century, could protect the heads of his gamekeepers and not be knocked off by branches as they rode. The design caught on widely with working men, as it offered some protection at a time when construction-zone hard hats did not yet exist. In America it was called the derby, and it covered the heads of many of the rough men of the Wild West as well as those of city-dwellers in the east.

At some point, people in the UK began to regard the bowler as a status symbol. A page on www.photodetective.co.uk observes that "In group photographs of workmen, the man wearing the bowler is the foreman. If you went on to a construction site the site manager would be wearing a bowler hat. He wore it for that reason. In the office world a 'bowler' said 'I am in middle management, I am not hourly paid; I am on a salary.' In the factory or workplace a bowler said 'I am the person in charge'." In early 20th century London, countless bankers and other professional office workers went to work in the morning with bowlers on their heads, umbrellas and newspapers tucked under their arms.

Bloom's thoughts in Lotus Eaters show that he wears this dull badge of belonging not for comfort or style but because of the impression it makes. Sitting down in one of the pews in St. Andrew's church, he complains about the bowler's rigidity and lack of accommodation to the individual skull: "He approached a bench and seated himself in its corner, nursing his hat and newspaper. These pots we have to wear. We ought to have hats modelled on our heads." Only after readers recognize that "pots" must refer to the unlovely symmetry of the bowler may they discover that Joyce, earlier in the same chapter, has studded his prose with a sly verbal echo of that object. When Bloom retrieves a business card standing in front of the post office, "His right hand came down into the bowl of his hat." This is one of Lotus Eaters' many evocations of tubs, pots, bowls, fonts, chalices, basins, troughs, wombs, feedbags, and other receptacles. It is also a blaring clue to the style of Bloom's hat.

Most people who know anything about Ulysses, if quizzed, would say that Bloom wears a bowler, but if they were quizzed about how they know it most would respond with a blank stare. One source of this widespread unexamined assumption probably can be found in the little pencil sketch of Bloom that Joyce made in 1926, but the novel never names the style. Instead, Joyce subtly invited the inference with "pots" and "bowl."

In Oxen of the Sun he added a slightly more definitive detail. On his first day of adult work, the narrative recalls, Bloom followed his father into the sales business with the requisite status symbol on his head: "in his first hard hat (ah, that was a day!), already on the road, a fullfledged traveller for the family firm, equipped with an orderbook, a scented handkerchief (not for show only), his case of bright trinketware (alas! a thing now of the past!) and a quiverful of compliant smiles for this or that halfwon housewife reckoning it out upon her fingertips or for a budding virgin, shyly acknowledging (but the heart? tell me!) his studied baisemoins. The scent, the smile, but, more than these, the dark eyes and oleaginous address, brought home at duskfall many a commission to the head of the firm, seated with Jacob's pipe after like labours in the paternal ingle."