Celia Fiennes's enthusiastic description of Liverpool as she saw it during her ‘Great Journey’ of 1698 may seem rather surprising, as the Liverpool she visited was a mere shadow of what it was to become. The population of this ‘little London’ was perhaps 5,000 or 6,000 people at the time of her visit, very little indeed when compared with the half million people who lived in the metropolis. There were no docks, hardly a proper port at all, but there was no doubt in the mind of observers that this small town on the Mersey was destined for greatness. Daniel Defoe called Liverpool ‘one of the wonders of Britain’ and enthused about its rapid growth since his first visit in 1680. ‘I am told’, he wrote in the mid-1720s, ‘that it still visibly encreases both in wealth, people, business and buildings. What it may grow to in time, I know not.’

Liverpool had in fact grown quite phenomenally, from perhaps 2,000 at the time of the Civil War, to rather more than 5,000 by the beginning of the eighteenth century, to 20,000 by 1750, and it was to quadruple in size yet again by the time of the First Census in 1801, when the population was said to be nearly 80,000. Such growth, heavily dependent on Liverpool's prestige in trade and shipping, naturally drew in huge numbers of migrants. Most of these were poor, destined to become servants, labourers, sailors and the like, but there were amongst them newcomers of higher social class. Commerce had become respectable and so ‘many gentlemen's sons of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Cheshire and North Wales are put apprentices in the town.’