The honour of being bestowed the 2008 European Capital of Culture for Liverpool England was a financial, promotional and, most importantly, a tourist opportunity for the city by the Mersey. The home of The Beatles, The Mersey Beat and Liverpool Football Club had much to show off to visitors after years of economic and social decline were counteracted with new commercial and cultural developments that revitalized the city beginning in the 1990s. However, from the earliest days of the eighteenth century, Liverpool had been a popular point of disembarkation for many travellers coming to England, in particular Americans.

David Seed, in his book American Travellers in Liverpool, has compiled a varied collection of writings by Americans from all backgrounds that found themselves on the banks of the Mersey between 1780 and 1909. The writers include such notable authors as Washington Irving, Henry James, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Willa Cather. Seed also includes observations from American businessman and inventor Zachariah Allen and Baptist minister Daniel Clarke Eddy, just two of the many diverse commentators that are incorporated in the book.

Seed devotes an entire chapter to the author Herman Melville, whose first literary success, the 1849 novel Redburn, presents a fictionalized account of Melville’s own visit and tenure in Liverpool some ten years earlier. Melville’s prose gives a most comprehensive account of Liverpool life and its famous docks in the nineteenth century. Similarly, another full chapter concentrates on the writings of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who served a five-year consulship under President Franklin Pearce. His own published writings combined with personal journals and the memoirs written by his son, Julian, provide an interesting and occasionally amusing look into the behavioural characteristics that differentiate the British and the Americans. These two chapters in particular provided the most detailed and complete observations and thoughts on Liverpool from two of America’s most important literary figures of the time.

Liverpool was the first stop for many Americans visiting the continent in the nineteenth century. Anyone interested in the relationship and eventual cultural bonds that developed between America and Liverpool in the twentieth century will find Seed’s book both informative and enlightening. This collection of memoirs, journals, letters and other writings coalesce to present a colourful and rich depiction of Liverpudlian life during the nineteenth century, and foreshadows the continuing cultural contacts between the city and America in the century to come.