So Spirited a Town

In this highly personal encounter with his native city Nicholas Murray blends literary descriptions of Liverpool across the centuries with his own memories of a 1960s Liverpool childhood to create an original and nuanced portrait of the character of a remarkable city. The result is a rich mosaic built up from a range of literary sources: quirky eighteenth- and nineteenth-century guide books, songs, poems, reminiscences, sermons, novels, letters, histories, travelogues, political tracts, autobiographies, essays, journalism, official reports, and jokes. This is a book about how Liverpool has been seen by others but it is also a personal and sometimes moving record of growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s and 1960s, exploring in an often light-hearted way what it means to be ‘Scouse’, never forgetting that De Quincey’s “many-languaged town” is a cosmopolitan, multi-racial seaport with an often tough history of poverty, industrial strife, migration, but, above all, humour.