I

IT MUST HAVE BEEN quite an experience, over the 1790s and well into the second decade of the nineteenth century, to enter Edward Rushton's bookshop at 56 Paradise Street, Liverpool. You would buy poetry books and political pamphlets, electoral speeches and portraits of local or national leading politicians, like William Roscoe or Henry Brougham; you would find petitions ‘To the Honourable the COMMONS of GREAT-BRITAIN’ to sign against the Gagging Acts in 1795; you could procure a special brand of leather blacking – Smith & Co. of Warrington, ‘recommended to the Public for its very superior Polish’ – and theatre tickets, as well as tickets for the annual dinner of the Independent Debating Society, where you would listen to disputes on the like topic: ‘Which is the most useful Member of the Community – the Peer, the Merchant, the Mechanic, or the Husbandman?’.

As Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite observe, examining the notion of Romantic sociability, the bookshop is integral in the ‘public space of Romanticism’, to the extent that – in the same way as the debating club or the theatre, the public house or the private dining room – it provided the material space where ‘a kind of text in its own right, a form of cultural work’ would happen. Advertisements regularly appearing in the columns of the Liverpool Mercury, which opened as a weekly in 1811, help reconstruct a reasonably detailed virtual homologue of the actual place, through the material and immaterial signs of a trade that was also, apparently, a trade in words and political action. In this sense, as the biographical accounts available unfailingly disclose, the bookselling activity well suited the Liverpool restless ex-sailor, ex-tavern-keeper, and ex-editor of a paper – its extant traces bearing evidence of his long-lasting, consistent, thoroughly articulate engagement in the most pressing issues of his troubled times.