“The Plymouth Rock of Old England”?

Abstract

Liverpool’s civic identity underwent a profound transformation in the early nineteenth century as its mercantile elite constructed an ambitious cultural infrastructure designed, in part, to obscure the port’s close association with the Atlantic slave trade. Partly inspired by William Roscoe’s Italianate vision, community leaders blended commerce, education, and the arts in an effort to convert the town into a latter-day “Florence of the North,” to use Arlene Wilson’s evocative phrase. Their endeavors bore fruit in a multiplicity of important local cultural institutions including the Athenaeum and the Royal Institution. This drive to create an identity that was provincial, bourgeois, and aesthetic was intended to distinguish Liverpool both from the polished metropolitan capital of London and from brash manufacturing centers like Manchester. However, it also had a strong Atlantic dimension from the outset. ¹ Certainly, North American admirers, faced with similar challenges in their own rapidly developing coastal cities, saw Liverpool as a role model that merited emulation. The Bostonian Joseph Buckminster outlined the case for doing so when he suggested in 1806 that US urban centers, “which have been mercenary and commercial,” should also “turn their attention to learning and the fine arts” so that, like Liverpool, they become “worthy of being visited, and interesting enough to be admired.”²