In the year that the city celebrates its 800th birthday, followed in 2008 by its designation as ‘European Capital of Culture’, the question is not whether there needs to be a book that examines the history and identity of literature from Liverpool but why that book should choose to concentrate on writing from the last eighty years. The latter is easier to address. Though notable writers such as William Roscoe (1753–1881), Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) and Arthur Clough (1819–61) were born in Liverpool, the city was from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century more associated with trade than art. The origins of this reputation make for uncomfortable reading. In 1699, the same year as its first slave ship, the Liverpool Merchant, set sail for Africa, where it picked up a ‘cargo’ of 220 Africans who were later ‘deposited’ in Barbados, Liverpool was afforded parish status by an Act of Parliament. Significantly, one of the movers behind the separation of Liverpool from the parish of Walton-on-the-Hilll, Sir Thomas Johnson, one of the part-owners of the Liverpool Merchant, became known in his own lifetime as ‘the founder of modern Liverpool’. The slave trade was to provide the financial impetus that allowed the city not only to cement its position within Britain but to grow in international influence and prestige. By the close of the eighteenth century, Liverpool controlled over 41 per cent of European and 80 per cent of Britain's slave commerce. By the start of the nineteenth century, 40 per cent of the world's trade was passing through Liverpool's docks.

What we think of as a distinctive literary voice only began to emerge in the 1930s – at precisely the time when the city experienced a sudden and rapid decline in economic fortune. It is impossible to imagine that when the Industrial Survey of 1932 forecast ‘a vast problem of unemployment will weigh on Merseyside for many years’, it envisaged this continuing into the next millennium. The facts tell a story of their own: a 44 per cent decline in population between 1951 and 2001; the award in 1993 of ‘Objective 1’ status funding in recognition that the area's per capita gross domestic product was less than 75 per cent of the European Union average; and the fact that in 2005, in five Liverpool constituencies, 40 per cent or more of children were living in a family on benefit.