The Making of a City of Culture: William Roscoe's Liverpool

I

On 4 June 2003 Liverpool won the nomination to be European Capital of Culture in 2008. In this essay, I focus on the role of William Roscoe (1753–1831) as an organizer, patron, and supporter of the arts in the same city some two hundred years earlier.¹ The nineteenth-century legacy of Roscoe and his associates is visible in Liverpool today as it makes its twenty-first-century bid for "culture" under the slogan "The World in One City."² Under the watchwords "create," "participate," and "regenerate," the successful application promised "a new expression of twenty-first-century British culture," "a culture defined through participation," and "a city made whole through cultural expression."³ Despite its comparably patrician concentration on the arts, Roscoe's own fashioning of a late Georgian city of culture is also, as we shall see, internationalist and various in its nature. At the forefront of a group of liberal, mostly dissenting, intellectuals and merchants in this rapidly expanding Atlantic seaport that by the second half of the eighteenth century had become heavily involved in the slave trade, Roscoe created wide-ranging projects that provide an illuminating example of how commerce, education, and the fine arts could combine successfully even in a politically conflicted environment. As an abolitionist Unitarian, Roscoe was often in robust, sometimes violent, conflict with the dominant commercial and political forces of his home town.⁴ In these respects, his institutionalization of the arts in Liverpool provided a useful model for American admirers faced with similar challenges in their own rapidly expanding eastern cities.

Accounts of Roscoe's cultural milieu have variously termed it a "coterie," even a "salon."⁵ In his immediate circle were James Currie (1756–1805), a medical practitioner who produced an edition and a biography of Burns, William Rathbone (1757–1809), a member of one of the town's wealthiest Quaker merchant families, and the Reverend William Shepherd (1768–1847), who presided at the Unitarian Chapel in Gateacre. Another of his close associates was Thomas Traill (1781–1862), editor of the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, who also played an important role in establishing the Athenaeum Club and the Liverpool Royal Institution. Although this essay focuses on Roscoe's most celebrated and, at times, seemingly preeminent role in Liverpool's cultural activities, the influence of this grouping of liberal and like-minded intellectuals should not be underestimated.

Two very differently inflected early-nineteenth-century literary descriptions of Roscoe's role in the cultural history of Liverpool are provided by Thomas de Quincey and Washington Irving. De Quincey's forms the "Literary Connexions or Acquaintances" part of his Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater, published by Tait's Magazine in 1837. It is an aggressive and not altogether reliable description, written with the retrospect of more than thirty years and colored by his belligerent Toryism, of his brief introduction as a precocious teenager to a Whig coterie that he belittles on the political front by comparison with Burke and ridicules on the literary front for its supposedly outdated, pre-Wordsworthian taste in poetry.⁶ Washington Irving's much more celebratory account forms part of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819–20) that, under cover of its pseudonym, recounts experiences of a voyage to Europe between 1815 and 1819. Crayon describes his arrival at the port of Liverpool and his chance encounter with its foremost literary celebrity who is characteristically ensconced in his home territory of the Athenaeum Club:

As I was once visiting this haunt of the learned my attention was attracted to a person just entering the room. He was advanced in life, tall, and of a form that might once have been commanding, but it was a little bowed by time—perhaps by care. He had a noble Roman style of countenance; a head that would have pleased a painter; and though some slight...