American Travellers in Liverpool

Liverpool was the first British port of call for most American travelers in the nineteenth century—and though some, like sour wordsmith Henry James, preferred to describe the more picturesque Chester, many left accounts of their experiences in the city. This volume unearths some of these richly detailed passages—by the likes of Herman Melville, writing on the Liverpool docks, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, recording his years as American consul—and pairs them with other fascinating glimpses of a Liverpool past by such towering historical figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe, John James Audubon, and Frederick Douglass. The excerpts collected here paint a portrait of Liverpool through American eyes—and demonstrate the rich variety of cultural contacts between the two nations during centuries gone by.