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Liverpool: Capital of Culture
Contemporary Review, May, 2004 by Richard Whittington-Egan
Modern names that have brought literary distinction to the city of their nativity or adoption: poets--Carol Ann Duffy, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten; playwrights--Alun Owen, Alan Plater, Willie Russell; novelists--James Hanley, Malcolm Lowry, and Beryl Bainbridge.
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Liverpool's roll call of distinguished and discerning visitants is impressive. The first great writer to make the pilgrimage was Chaucer, arriving in 1358, as a member of the travelling household of Lionel, Duke of Clarence. Unfortunately, he left no record of his visit, no traveller's tale. Daniel Defoe, arriving three hundred years later, said: 'Liverpool is one of the wonders of Britain ... There is no town in England, except London, that can equal Liverpool for the Fineness of the Streets and Beauty of the Building'. Thomas Carlyle, a frequent visitor, 'rather liked Liverpool and is people'. Thomas De Quincey used to stay in 'the many-languaged town of Liverpool' and Charles Dickens was wont to say that Liverpool lay in his heart next to London. It was at Argyle Street Police Station that, in the 1830s, he enrolled as a Special Constable, in order to investigate the seedy underworld of Sailor Town. It was in Liverpool that he set his cap, unsuccessfully, at 19-year-old Christiana Weller, spinster, of Anfield. She was to marry his friend, Thomas Thompson and become the mother of Alice Meynell. Dickens was a great favorite in Liverpool, where he gave many of his virtuoso reading performances while Thackeray gave a series of lectures at the city's Philharmonic Hall.
Gerald Manley Hopkins, John Masefield, and Hugh Walpole were all subsequent fleeting visitors. Carl Jung said that Liverpool was 'the pool of life', having, with a psychologist's shrewdness, observed the city's essential vitality, and its people's irrepressible, impertinent joie de vivre. Adolf Hitler is reported to have spent a year in Liverpool in 1912. He stayed with his half-brother, Alois, who kept a guest-house. The Fuhrer-to-be left no recorded comment in the visitors' book of history. However the event later gave the Liverpool novelist Beryl Bainbridge the idea for her novel Young Adolf.
From the opening of its first playhouse, the Drury Lane Theatre in 1759, the drama has been 'a potent force in the development of a Liverpool tradition'. The Theatre Royal, opened in Williamson Square in 1762, latterly a cold storage premises, witnessed across its stage a procession of the finest artists of their age. Among those who played their long-remembered hour there were Mrs. Siddons in Hamlet, Joe Grimaldi, the immortal clown, and in January 1832, Paganini gave three concerts there, my great-grandfather conducting.
During Victorian and Edwardian times Liverpool proved an enthusiastically theatre-going city. It is a quality still well evidenced. The Playhouse in Williamson Square--'The best repertory company in the kingdom', pronounced J. B. Priestly--has been the nursery of a number of Britain's finest acting talents, among them Liverpool-born Rex Harrison, Michael Redgrave, Rachel Kempson, Diana Wynyard, Robert Donat, Flora Robson, Richard Briers, and Rita Tushingham. And the Everyman Theatre, set up in what used to be Hope Hall, a Victorian rebel revivalist preacher's chapel, has successfully embraced and exploited 'advanced' productions of various kinds. An interesting and little-known fact is that the Empire Theatre, built in the nineteen-twenties, had no bar, because it had been modelled on a New York theatre which had been erected in the days of Prohibition. This shortcoming was rapidly remedied!
