Why go
Helen Forrester’s Twopence to Cross the Mersey and James Hanley’s dockside fiction offer contrasting ways into Liverpool’s social history. The Liverpool poets bring the 1960s cultural moment into view. Read a short extract before walking the centre or waterfront to give those settings a sharper human scale.
The full story
Liverpool has appeared in writing from the age of Atlantic voyages to the twentieth century. Herman Melville’s Redburn follows a young sailor’s crossing between New York and Liverpool, with passages set in the port city. James Hanley, born in Kirkdale, wrote about seamen and working-class life; The Furys begins a sequence rooted in Liverpool experience. Helen Forrester’s Twopence to Cross the Mersey looks back to a childhood marked by poverty during the Great Depression. Beryl Bainbridge, born in Liverpool and raised nearby, developed a different body of psychological fiction. In poetry, Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten became associated with the Liverpool poets; their anthology The Mersey Sound appeared in 1967. The Greek poet Constantine Cavafy also spent part of his childhood in Liverpool after his family moved there. These connections are not a single literary trail with guaranteed sites. They offer different lenses on the port, domestic life and the city’s 1960s cultural confidence, and help a visitor look past the most famous music story.