So Spirited a Town – Visions and Versions of Liverpool

In this highly personal encounter with his native city, renowned biographer Nicholas Murray blends literary descriptions of Liverpool across the centuries with memories of his own 1960s Liverpool childhood in order to create an original and highly nuanced portrait of the character of this remarkable city. The result is a rich mosaic of description and experience built from a range of literary sources: Swift, Defoe, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickens, Woolf, and Orwell, as well as quirky eighteenth- and nineteenth-century guide books, songs, poems, reminiscences, sermons, novels, histories, travelogues, autobiographies, essays, official reports, journalism, and jokes. So Spirited a Town is a book about how Liverpool has been seen through the eyes of others, but at the same time it is also a personal and moving record of growing up Liverpudlian in the mid-twentieth century: exploring the light-hearted meaning of coming of age “Scouse” while never forgetting that De Quincey’s “many-languaged town” is a cosmopolitan, multiracial seaport with an often tough history of poverty, industrial strife, migration, and, above all, humor.