Russell Croft
Take a journey into the past
I have written previously about the journalist Hugh Shimmin, who was such a vivid observer of Liverpool’s mid-Victorian low-life, and such a committed activist for improved social conditions in the…
Liverpool must have presented a magnificent prospect to visitors in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, whether arriving by sea or rail. They could hardly fail to be impressed…
Writing in the 1850s and 1860s, often in his own publication the Porcupine, Hugh Shimmin invokes a desperate Liverpudlian landscape of squalid and overcrowded living, causal labour, acute poverty, hopeless drink…