William Roscoe

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The Making of a City of Culture: William Roscoe’s Liverpool

John Whale University of Leeds

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On June Liverpool won the nomination to be European Capi-tal of Culture in . In this essay, I focus on the role of William Ros-coe ( – ) as an organizer, patron, and supporter of the arts in thesame city some two hundred years earlier.1 The nineteenth-century legacyof Roscoe and his associates is visible in Liverpool today as it makes itstwenty-rst-century bid for “culture” under the slogan “The World in OneCity.”2 Under the watchwords “create,” “participate,” and “regenerate,” thesuccessful application promised “a new expression of twenty-rst-centuryBritish culture,” “a culture dened through participation,” and “a city made whole through cultural expression.”3 Despite its comparably patrician con-centration on the arts, Roscoe’s own fashioning of a late Georgian city ofculture is also, as we shall see, internationalist and various in its nature. Atthe forefront of a group of liberal, mostly dissenting, intellectuals and mer-chants in this rapidly expanding Atlantic seaport that by the second halfof the eighteenth century had become heavily involved in the slave trade,Roscoe created wide-ranging projects that provide an illuminating exampleof how commerce, education, and the ne arts could combine successfullyeven in a politically conicted environment. As an abolitionist Unitarian,Roscoe was often in robust, sometimes violent, conict with the domi-

Eighteenth-Century Life Volume , Number , Spring © by Duke University Press

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nant commercial and political forces of his home town.4 In these respects,his institutionalization of the arts in Liverpool provided a useful model

for American admirers faced with similar challenges in their own rapidlyexpanding eastern cities.

Accounts of Roscoe’s cultural milieu have variously termed it a “cote-rie,” even a “salon.”5 In his immediate circle were James Currie ( – ),a medical practitioner who produced an edition and a biography of Burns, William Rathbone ( – ), a member of one of the town’s wealth-iest Quaker merchant families, and the Reverend William Shepherd( – ), who presided at the Unitarian Chapel in Gateacre. Another

of his close associates was Thomas Traill ( – ), editor of the eighthedition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica , who also played an important rolein establishing the Athenaeum Club and the Liverpool Royal Institution. Although this essay focuses on Roscoe’s most celebrated and, at times,seemingly preeminent role in Liverpool’s cultural activities, the inuenceof this grouping of liberal and like-minded intellectuals should not beunderestimated.

Two very differently inected early-nineteenth-century literary descrip-tions of Roscoe’s role in the cultural history of Liverpool are provided by Thomas de Quincey and Washington Irving. De Quincey’s forms the “Lit-erary Connexions or Acquaintances” part of his Autobiography of an En glishOpium-Eater , published byTait’s Magazine in . It is an aggressive andnot altogether reliable description, written with the retrospect of more thanthirty years and colored by his belligerent Toryism, of his brief introductionas a precocious teenager to a Whig coterie that he belittles on the politi-cal front by comparison with Burke and ridicules on the literary front forits supposedly outdated, pre-Wordsworthian taste in poetry.6 Washington

Irving’s much more celebratory account forms part ofThe Sketch Book ofGeoffrey Crayon, Gent ( – ) that, under cover of its pseudonym, recountsexperiences of a voyage to Europe between and . Crayon describeshis arrival at the port of Liverpool and his chance encounter with its fore-most literary celebrity who is characteristically ensconced in his home terri-tory of the Athenaeum Club:

As I was once visiting this haunt of the learned my attention was attractedto a person just entering the room. He was advanced in life, tall, and ofa form that might once have been commanding, but it was a little bowedby time — perhaps by care. He had a noble Roman style of countenance; ahead that would have pleased a painter; and though some slight furrows on

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his brow shewed that wasting thought had been busy there, yet his eye stillbeamed with the re of a poetic soul. There was something in the whole

appearance that indicated a being of a different order from the bustlingrace around him.I inquired his name and was informed that it was Roscoe. I drew

back with an involuntary feeling of veneration. This then was an Authorof celebrity; this was one of those men, whose voices have gone forthto the ends of the earth; with whose minds I have communed even inthe solitudes of America. Accustomed as we are in our country to knowEuropean writers only by their works, we cannot conceive of them, as ofother men, engrossed by trivial or sordid pursuits, and jostling with thecrowd of common minds in the dusty paths of life. They pass before our

imaginations like superior beings, radiant with the emanations of theirgenius, and surrounded by a halo of literary glory.7

Irving’s initial response to literary celebrity is to view it as the embodimentof individual genius. We seem to be promised a protoromantic account ofRoscoe as a solitary, gifted individual at odds with “trivial or sordid pur-suits” and “the crowd of common minds.” What sounds like a story of dis-advantage overcome, however, turns into a particularly pointed integrationof aesthetics and economics. As the portrait of celebrity continues, it beginsto dene Roscoe as the product of his surroundings and to articulate theimportance of his example in specically transatlantic terms. Irving’s atten-tion appears to be rmly focused on the comparison with the fast-developingports on the eastern seaboard of the United States. What he sees is an emi-nently suitable European model of how commerce and the arts can workhappily together. The value of Roscoe lies precisely in the fact that he isnot a unique genius whose work cannot be reproduced, but a promoter andorganizer of arts institutions:

To nd, therefore, the elegant historian of the Medici, mingling amongthe busy sons of traffi c at rst shocked my poetical ideas; but it is from the very circumstances and situation in which he has been placed, that Mr.Roscoe derives his highest claims to admiration. . . .

. . . Born in a place apparently ungenial to the growth of literarytalent; in the very market place of trade; without fortune, familyconnexions or patronage; self prompted, self sustained and almost selftaught, he has conquered every obstacle, achieved his way to eminence, andhaving become one of the ornaments of the nation, has turned the whole

force of his talents and inuence to advance and embellish his native town.. . . But his private life is peculiarly worthy the attention of the

citizens of our young and busy country, where literature and the elegant


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arts must grow up side by side with the coarser plants of daily necessity;and must depend for their culture, not on the exclusive devotion of time

and wealth, nor the quickening rays of titled patronage, but on hours andseasons snatched from the pursuit of worldly interests, by intelligent andpublic spirited individuals.

He has shown how much may be done for a place in hours of leisure,by one master spirit, and how completely it can give its own impress tosurrounding objects. Like his own Lorenzo De Medici, on whom he seemsto have xed his eye as on a pure model of antiquity, he has interwoventhe history of his life with the history of his native town. Wherever you goin Liverpool you perceive traces of his footsteps in all that is elegant andliberal. ( )

Irving’s account is alert to the self-made nature of Roscoe’s achievementand helpfully perceptive in highlighting his role in developing structuresand organizations that can reach beyond the individual.

Roscoe’s importance to the enterprise of culture in late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century Liverpool can be measured by hisinvolvement in a number of related projects: the Liverpool Society for Pro-moting Painting and Design (which held exhibitions in and );the Athenaeum Club; the Literary and Philosophical Society; the Liver-pool Library; the Botanic Garden that opened in ; and the LiverpoolRoyal Institution, opened in . 8 The Liverpool Royal Institution bestcharacterizes Roscoe’s vision of the arts. It represents the culmination andconsolidation of his various projects, incorporating within one organiza-tion facilities and opportunities for art, literature, science, and education.9 According to its president in the early s, B. A. Heywood, the idea forsuch an institution had been around since the s and an academy “forthe promotion of science and ne arts” had then opened in Liverpool, onlyto close shortly afterwards “for want of encouragement.” The very “com-prehensive nature” of the Institution, “the great variety and extent of itsobjects,” seems to have been seen as something of a risk, but one taken onthe understanding that it was possible for the arts and science to provide“mutual guidance and support.” As ever, the “commercial point of view” was an integral part of the enterprise in which “the cultivation of the nearts may be considered as supplying a source of employment” and “increas-ing the stock of productive labour.”10

The degree to which Roscoe was synonymous — as Irving’s accountsuggests — with the aspirant cultural organization of his home town alsopoints to a certain vulnerability in its structure. Roscoe and his colleagues


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seem to have been acutely aware of the danger of such enterprises restingsolely on the efforts of an individual, no matter how talented and energetic

he might be. The precariousness of his prominence in most of these orga-nizations was something that contributed to the founding of the LiverpoolRoyal Institution in . Its establishment was thought of as securing thefuture of the diverse enterprises in which he had often taken the lead. Onhis death in the address of the general meeting of proprietors by theReverend Jonathan Brooks in February of that year condently predictsthat, despite his being “taken from us, . . . the literature of Roscoe will longbe associated with the commercial opulence of Liverpool” and that “pre-

cisely because of his successful contribution . . . in establishing institutionsfor promoting literature and the arts, . . . after ages will long continue todiscover his guiding hand in the many monuments of improvement andexquisite taste which he has left behind.”11

The identity of Liverpool ’s emergent cultural institutions is deter-mined in part by its prosperous commercial nature. What characterizes the various statements about the institutions is the condent and frequentlyasserted symbiosis of commerce and the ne arts.12 The impetus to institu-tionalize also seems to be produced out of the belief that disseminating thebenets of the arts to as wide a public as possible will be “productive” bothaesthetically and economically.

Roscoe’s Address, delivered before the Proprietors of the Botanic Garden, inLiverpool, previous to opening the Garden, May is indicative in a num-ber of ways of the principles and pressures informing his idea of an artsinstitution. After paying tribute to the “unanimity, spirit, and liberality”of those who have committed funds as proprietors, he feels it necessary to justify the project “no less to [the] public than to ourselves.” There follows

a lengthy defense against the idea that “botany” might be seen as a “triingemployment,” and the rst vindication comes in the form of evidence ofdivine creation or, as Roscoe puts it in keeping with his devout Unitari-anism, “decisive and ocular demonstration . . . and unanswerable proof ofthe existence, the wisdom, and goodness of God.”13 This is later supportedby a more worldly educational concern: that the disciplined and regulatedobservation of nature encourages the inculcation of “habits of order andarrangement” deemed “proper for youth.” More particularly, this prompts

Roscoe to think of one of his favorite ideas: that a skill can be specializedto the degree that it challenges or at least questions traditional notions ofgenius. For example, the visual powers of observation and discrimination


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necessary in botany lead him to consider not only the exceptionally “pen-etrating” vision of Linnaeus, but also the compensatory specialization of

one “Mr Gough” from Kendal “who, although wholly deprived of sight,has improved his other senses, his touch, his smell, and his taste, to suchan extent, as to distinguish all the native plants of this country, with anaccuracy not attained by many of those who have the advantages of sight,and which justly entitles him to rank with the rst botanists of the king-dom” ( – ). The power of a limited, but acute skill is something thatfascinates him throughout his career and is evident as much in his cham-pioning of the powerful Lorenzo di Medici, as we shall see, as in his curi-

osity and support for the Welsh sherman turned multilinguist, RichardRoberts Jones.14In addition to offering these tangential educational opportunities, the

garden itself is also geared to social utility with many of the plants chosenfor and dened by their medicinal and agricultural usefulness. The mainidea of social utility in this instance, however, lies in the very fact of theBotanic Garden being a “public institution” rather than a “private collec-tion.” On this rests its capacity not only for accessibility, but for dissemi-nation, and as we have seen in Washington Irving’s account, its powerfulability to encourage imitation:

The great superiority of a public institution over a private collection,in promoting botanical sciences, will be suffi ciently apparent, from theconsideration, that the latter depends upon the taste, the nances, orthe caprice of an individual, and if it be encouraged and fostered duringhis life, is frequently dispersed at his death. . . . That private collectionsare in general of diffi cult access, whereas the very end and object of ourestablishment is to render it as extensively useful as possible. The joint

encouragement and patronage of so many of whom have connexions inforeign parts, which may enable them to render this infant institutionthe most essential services, certainly afford us the most atteringprospects of success. And it is with pleasure I can communicate to you,that this example has already excited a spirit of emulation in some of theprincipal towns of the kingdom, where proposals have been published forinstitutions on a similar plan. The intercourse to which it is to be hopedthese establishments will give rise, and the free communication of everyinteresting discovery or improvement, cannot fail of diffusing a moregeneral attention to studies of this nature, and eventually of contributing

in a high degree to the welfare of the community at large. (Roscoe,BotanicGarden, – )


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Liverpool’s situation as a center for international trade, its “connexions withforeign parts,” make it seem almost providentially suited to serve as the

exemplum for the institutionalization and dissemination of this particularform of knowledge. But such a positive vision of the port’s role in a progres-sivist, mercantile history and its connection with the “proof of the existence,the wisdom and the goodness of God” was not always possible for Roscoe. The commercial prosperity of his home town was, most obviously, impli-cated in the Atlantic slave trade, and his concerted and sustained promotionof enlightened cultural enterprise throughout his career might be construed,at least in part, as an attempt at historical redemption, at the very least as an

attempt to turn trade to more positive moral account.15

The diffi culty faced by Roscoe in joining Liverpool’s rising commer-cial prosperity with a liberal progressiveness in the arts can best be seen inhis meditative, loco-descriptive poem, “Mount Pleasant,” written at theage of nineteen, but not published until , which uses the prospect of hisnative hamlet on an eminence above the fast-growing port in order to offera critique of commerce, luxury, and the slave trade. Though enamored ofLiverpool, Roscoe’s poem is predicated from its outset on rural retreat andpastoral critique, aligning itself with Pope’s “Windsor Forest” ( ), JohnDyer’s “Grongar Hill” ( ), and Richard Jago’s “Edge-hill” ( ). Withfearful fascination, it offers a scene of busy industry on the banks of theriver Mersey:

How numerous now her thronging buildings rise! What varied objects strike the wandering eyes! Where rise yon masts her crowded navies ride, And the broad rampire checks the beating tide; Along the beach her spacious streets extend,

Her areas open, and her spires ascend;In loud confusion mingled sounds arise, The docks re-echoing with the seaman’s cries, The massy hammer sounding from afar, The bell slow-tolling, and the rattling car; And thundering oft the cannon’s horrid roar,In lessening echoes dies along the shore. (l l. – )16

Though he marvels and approves such signs of energy and enterprise, the

narrator’s enthusiasm for the commercial spirit is mitigated by the ruralescape offered in the nostalgic opening lines: “Freed from the cares that


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daily throng my breast, / Again, beneath my native shades I rest.” Roscoeoperates at a slight, but signicant remove from the center. And this geo-

graphical positioning mirrors his sense of the aesthetic that derives fromcommerce, but that constitutes itself as leisure. Like many other similarpoems, “Mount Pleasant” uses the historical perspective of the ruin ofempires to invoke the need for ethical trade. Not surprisingly, the great-est disturbance to the poem’s celebration of his native town is provided byslavery, and the poem’s least convincing maneuver is the way it moves intoa catalogue of Liverpool’s cultural achievements. Typically, these consist ofcultural institutions in the widest civic sense: the opening of the Theatre

Royal as a result of subscriptions, the public inrmary, the almshouses, andthe Bluecoat Hospital for orphans. While the poem outlines a preferred,healthy form of commerce, it offers no comment on the way in which suchachievements might be tainted by collusion with the worst trade of all. “Thepride of Mersey’s spacious tide” rises, according to this middle passage ofthe poem, because the “ARTS have here chosen their blest retreat” (ll. ,). Providence, economic progress, and the ethical possibility of history

are here present in uneasy and undened combination.

II

Roscoe’s main claim to fame, as Washington Irving recognized in , was hisLife of Lorenzo de’ Medici , rst published in two volumes in ,a historical biography whose subject is a gifted individual’s central role inthe promotion of the arts in a city republic.17 His account emphasizes theimportance of peace for the development of trade and the nontyrannical,

strongly representative nature of government in the ourishing of the arts.“Improvement” works in conjunction with a principle of “rational liberty.”Lorenzo’s achievements are brought about by the “authority of reason”rather than the force of tyranny, and his strengths, according to Roscoe,are prudence and moderation, the two characteristics that allow generalcultural improvement to take place. Lorenzo’s importance lies not in beingan original genius in his own right (though Roscoe, as ever, is concernedby the variety of genius’s manifestations), but rather in his setting up of thecultural institutions from which art can be generated. Learned societiesand libraries, Roscoe stresses, are the seeds for the owering of this ItalianRenaissance city of culture. In this way, Lorenzo can justiably be termed


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a “benecent genius” whose “urbanity” permeates through the ranks ofsociety while generally improving and reforming taste.18

In the preface to his biography, Roscoe denes the idea that seized hisimagination:

In tracing the rise of modern literature, I soon perceived that every thinggreat and estimable in science and in art, revolved round Lorenzo de’Medici, during the short but splendid aera of his life, as a common centre,and derived from him its invariable preservation and support. ( :xv)

The nature of Roscoe’s improvements can be gauged from his portrait of

Lorenzo as someone who “distinctly saw the beacon of the public welfare”through “the thick mist of popular fears and prejudices” ( : ). The moregeneral social utility, however, sits uneasily alongside the notion of genius.Near the end of the rst volume of the biography, Roscoe claims that “tal-ent may follow and improve; emulation and industry may polish and rene;but genius alone can break those barriers that restrain the throng of man-kind in the common track of life” ( : ). Yet he is forced to admit that“genius assimilates not with the character of the age. Homer and Shake-speare have no imitators, and are no models.” “The example of such tal-ents,” he speculates, “is perhaps upon the whole unfavourable to the gen-eral progress of improvement, and the superlative abilities of a few, havemore than once damped the ardour of a nation” ( : ). With this in mind,he is forced to make out a special case for Michelangelo’s genius as one that was peculiarly susceptible to popular emulation.19

Roscoe describes Lorenzo’s project as working with contemporaryartists in order to “excite among them, if possible, a better taste” and to“elevate their views beyond the forms of common life, to the contempla-tion of that ideal beauty which alone distinguishes works of art from meremechanical productions” ( : ). To this end, he establishes a school oracademy adjacent to the monastery of San Marco; and it is to “this institu-tion,” according to Roscoe, that “more than any other circumstances, wemay, without hesitation, ascribe the sudden and astonishing prociency,towards the close of the fteenth century, which took place in the arts,and which commencing at Florence, extended itself in concentric circles tothe rest of Europe” ( : – ). Even the Renaissance, then, here described

rather awkwardly as manifesting “astonishing prociency,” Roscoe explainsin terms of the institutionalization of art.


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At the end of the biography, Lorenzo leads Roscoe to a nal reconsid-eration of the idea of genius:

Thus died Lorenzo de’ Medici; a man who may be selected from allthe characters of ancient and modern history, as exhibiting the mostremarkable instance of depth of penetration, versatility of talent andcomprehension of mind. . . . If the powers of the mind are to bear down allobstacles that oppose their progress, it seems necessary that they shouldsweep along in some certain course, and in one collected mass. Whatthen, shall we think of that rich fountain which, whilst it was pouredout by so many different channels, owed through each with a full andequal stream? To be absorbed in one pursuit, however important, is notthe characteristic of the higher class of genius, which, piercing throughthe various combinations and relations of surrounding circumstances,sees all things in their just dimensions, and attributes to each its due. Ofthe various occupations in which Lorenzo was engaged, there is not onein which he was not eminently successful; but he was most particularlydistinguished in those which justly hold the rst rank in humanestimation. ( : – )

Despite the various institutions on which Roscoe has placed so much

emphasis, the salutary history lesson to be learned from fteenth-centuryFlorence is that having an individual as the “common centre” or “rich foun-tain” of the city’s cultural activity is precarious. With the death of Lorenzocomes sudden decline: “All that the assiduity and the riches of Lorenzoand his ancestors had been able to accumulate in half a century, was dis-sipated or demolished in a day” ( : ). Lorenzo di Medici’s individualismalso offers a pertinent reminder of Roscoe’s long-term commitment to “thefriends of peace”: without the political stability and power to guard against war and internal strife, the fragile edices of the arts and the progress oftheir improvement are soon laid waste.20

III

In a discourse delivered at the Liverpool Royal Institution in , Roscoelays out in more extended form his principles regarding the “ne arts.”21 Most ttingly for the audience before him, composed as it was of Liver-

pool’s notable worthies, men making fortunes either directly in trade ormore indirectly as nanciers like himself, Roscoe sees these arts as an inte-


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gral part of the commercial spirit, capable of producing the wealth of thenation, if given the opportunity by a “state of general tranquility,” that is,

by the absence of war and a lack of government interference. Despite usingthe designation “ne arts,” Roscoe refuses any connection with luxury: forhim, these arts possess “an indispensable utility.” Where they are “discour-aged, . . . no country must expect to obtain its full advantage, even in alucrative point of view, much less to arrive at a high degree of civilizationand prosperity, and to signalize itself in the annals of mankind.” In Ros-coe’s vision the ne arts might require support (his word might be “cultivation”), but only because, in the long run, they would pay you back. He

writes of a recuperable investment, not of subsidy:If you will protect the arts, the arts will, and ought to remunerate you. To suppose that they are to be encouraged upon some abstract anddisinterested plan, from which all idea of utility shall be excluded, is tosuppose that a building can be erected without a foundation. There is nota greater error, than to think that the arts can subsist upon the generosityof the public. They are willing to repay whatever is devoted to theiradvantage; but they wil l not become slaves. . . . The arts can only ourish where they command. . . . What should we think of giving a premium to

the author of a worthless poem, by way of encouraging poetry? ( )

At the heart of his discourse is a self-conscious support for what he knowsto be the distinctly unfashionable “principle of utility.” At this crucial stagein his argument Roscoe falls back on an Edenic pastoral and his idea of“the full-handed gifts of the Creator” in order to justify the presence of“pleasure” alongside improvement and rationality. Roscoe’s union of utilityand the ne arts conrms his belief in self-determination, the capacity andresponsibility of choice that is the birthright of our divinely exalted status. Taking philosophical support from Dugald Stewart’s example of a “manof benevolence,” he gives divine authority to his union of aesthetics andeconomics: “Utility and pleasure are thus bound together in an indissolu-ble chain, and what the author of nature has joined, let no man put asun-der” ( ). Ethics and commerce are no longer separate, as they were in the youthful prospect poem “Mount Pleasant.” The vulnerability of “leisure” ishere overcome with the joining together of benevolent sensibility and self-determination. The “indissoluble chain” of utility and pleasure frees Ros-coe from the hellish determinism of both geography and history:


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To suppose that the human race is subjected to a certain and invariable law,by which they continue either to degenerate or to improve; to presume that

the progress of civilization, science, and taste, is limited to certain climatesand tracts of country or to adopt the idea that when they have arisen to acertain degree of excellence, they must, in the common course of affairs,necessarily decline, is to deaden all exertion and to subject the process ofthe mind to the operations of inert matter, or the uctuations of accidentand chance. Experience however demonstrates that it is to the inuenceof moral causes, to these dispositions and arrangements in the affairs ofmankind that are particularly within our own power, that we are to seekfor the reasons of the progress or decline of liberal studies. ( )

With this triumph of the divine forces of improvement, Roscoe can con-clude his celebratory discourse in the condence that the Royal Institu-tion can play a full and integrated role in the life of all ranks in his nativecity, that it can join in the phenomenal expansion of Liverpool into a cityof culture:

It is to the union of the pursuit of literature with affairs of the world,that we are to look forwards towards the improvement of both; towardsthe stability and foundation of the one, and the grace and ornament of

the other, and this union is most likely to be effected by establishmentsin the nature of the present Institution, founded in the midst of a greatcommercial community, and holding out opportunities of instruction,not only to those intended for the higher and more independent ranks oflife, but for those who, amidst the duties of an active profession, or theengagement of mercantile concerns, wish to cultivate their intellectualpowers and acquirements. ( )

IV Washington Irving was not the only American to recognize Liverpool’sparticular brand of cultural enterprise as one that might be well suitedto the expanding cities on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Jeffersonresponded positively to Roscoe’s description of the Liverpool Royal Insti-tution in a letter from Monticello dated December , claiming that“your Liverpool institution will also aid us in the organization of our newUniversity, an establishment now in progress in this state, and to which

my remaining days and faculties will be devoted.” That this transatlan-tic interchange was already a two-way dialogue is conrmed by the same


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letter’s recognition of Roscoe’s “treatise on penal jurisprudence” (based onthe state prisons of Philadelphia, New York, and Massachusetts) that Ros-

coe had sent him soon after publication in . Jefferson read the treatise“with great pleasure,” acknowledging that “the great light you have thrownon the subject will . . . be useful to our experiment.”22 In fact, Roscoe’s cor-respondence contains an impressive list of American contacts, including Josiah Quincy, Mayor of Boston, and Louis Dwight, Secretary of Bos-ton’s Prison Discipline Society, as well as Gulian C. Verplanck and SamuelHopkins of New York, Edward Livingston of Louisiana, and James Measeand William Short of Philadelphia. The extent of this correspondence and

its exchange of ideas, particularly but not exclusively in the area of penalinstitutions, has led Katherine Lloyd to describe the correspondents as a“community of reform.”23

Roscoe’s achievement might be said to lie in his perception that com-mercial enterprise could work in tandem with the ourishing of the arts,especially when located in an institution that, though sponsored by privatesubscription funds, opened itself up to wider public use. The example of afast-growing Atlantic port, considered by many to be remote from the pol-ished metropolitan center of London, must have been appealing to devel-oping cities like New York and Boston. Roscoe’s achievement also providesan opportunity to view urban artistic production in the Romantic periodin a new light. Behind his impressively wide-ranging cultural activities isa reevaluation of the individual’s role in the arts and a signicant reassess-ment of the notion of original genius producing discrete works. Roscoe’screativity consists of acts of organization, collection, patronage, and moregenerally accessible forms of public display and education. Through theseactivities he was able to operate successfully as the presiding genius — or

“master spirit,” as Washington Irving puts it in his portrait of — ofLiverpool’s cultural aspirations at the beginning of the nineteenth cen-tury. Because his ideas and activities were secured in viable institutions,his inuence could be felt strongly in the city through the next century anda half. As Liverpool looks with renewed aspirations towards its EuropeanCapital of Culture status in , Roscoe provides a pertinent example ofhow the late eighteenth century attempted to provide the basis of enduringcultural creativity.


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Notes

. See Henry Roscoe,The Life of William Roscoe , vols. (London: T. Cadell,); George Chandler, William Roscoe of Liverpool, – (London: Batsford,); Donald A. Macnaughton, Roscoe of Liverpool: His Life, Writings, and Treasures, – (Birkenhead: Countyvise, ); and J. B. Bullen, The Myth of the

Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Oxford Univ., ), – .. The collections of the Walker Art Gallery and the Picton Library, now

Liverpool Central Library, were based in part on Roscoe’s collections when he wasforced to sell after bankruptcy in . For the Liverpool Athenaeum Club and theLiverpool Royal Institution, whose archives are now held within the University ofLiverpool, see http://www.athena.force .co.uk and http://sca.lib.liv.ac.uk.

. For Liverpool’s response to the nomination and its preparations for ,see www.liverpoolculture.com. For the terms, aims, and procedures of thenomination, see www.culture.gov.uk/global/publications/archive_ /captial_culture_report.htm.

. See F. E. Sanderson, “The Liverpool Abolitionists,” inLiverpool, the AfricanSlave Trade, and Abolition, ed. Roger Anstey and P. E. Hair (Liverpool: LiverpoolUniv., ), – , and George Chandler , William Roscoe of Liverpool , .Sanderson also notes the covert nature of the Liverpool abolitionists’ activities andthe greater danger of their overt sympathizing with the French Revolution. SeymourDrescher, in “Abolition: Values and Forces in Britain” from the same volume,

charts the changing climate of opinion from the late s to in which thehumanitarian argument overtook the economic one and suggests a climate in whichsocial and ethical respectability might have been sought indirectly in the kind ofcultural activity promoted by Roscoe and his associates ( – ).

. See Nanora Sweet, “‘Lorenzo’s’ Liverpool and ‘Corinne’s’ Coppet: TheItalianate Salon and Romantic Education,” inLessons of Romanticism: A CriticalCompanion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham: Duke Univ., ),

– ; Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, Revisonary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge, and HighRomantic Argument(Liverpool: Liverpool Univ., ), – ; and KatherineM. R. Lloyd, Peace, Politics, and Philanthropy: Henry Brougham, William Roscoe and

America, – (unpublished Ph.D. diss., Oxford Univ., ), – . Sweetfocuses helpfully on “a culture of Disestablishment” in the Roscoe circle and drawsattention to its internationalist character ( – ).

. See vol. of Works of Thomas De Quincey , ed. Daniel Sanjiv Roberts(London: Pickering and Chatto, – ), – , and Roberts, Revisionary Gleam, – .

. Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent , from TheComplete Works of Washington Irving , ed. Harkell Springer (Boston: Twayne, ), .

. See Resolutions, Reports and Bye-Laws of the Liverpool Royal Institution, – March (Liverpool, ); Henry A. Ormerod, The Liverpool Royal

Institution: A Record and a Retrospect (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ., ); and A. T. Brown, Some Account of the Royal Institution School Liverpool with a Roll of Masters and Boys (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ., ).


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. According to Henry A. Ormerod in Liverpool Royal Institution, Roscoe maynot have been the originator of the idea for such an institution, but he played a

leading part in its activities, held the post of president, and was a prime mover in anumber of the organizations that preceded it: “The Liverpool Royal Institution wasfounded by a group of men, many of them members of Roscoe’s circle, who at theend of the eighteenth and in the early years of the nineteenth century had beenlargely responsible for the foundation of such institutions as the Athenaeum, theLyceum, to which the old Liverpool Library was transferred, the Botanic Garden,and the Literary and Philosophical Society. In the creation of all these Roscoehimself had played an important part, and the general plan of the Royal Institutionitself reects his wide interests in Art, Literature, Science and Education. If theoriginal idea of the Institution was not Roscoe’s own, he devoted himself at an early

stage to the scheme, becoming Chairman of the general Committee in and therst president in , [and] the inaugural address at the offi cial opening wasdelivered by him on November ” ( ).

. Ormerod, Liverpool Royal Institution, – , , and , respectively.

. Jonathan Brooks, Address Delivered at the General Meeting of Proprietors of theLiverpool Royal Institution, on the th February by the Rev. Jonathan Brooks, VicePresident (Liverpool: Egerton Smith, ), .

. See B. A. Heywood, Addresses Delivered at the Meetings of the Proprietorsof the Liverpool Royal Institution, on February, , and February, byB. A. Heywood, Esq. President (Liverpool: printed for Harris and Co., ): “Thealliance of extended trade with learning and the arts is illustrated by the history ofall ages. The earliest records of scripture history shew their co-existence in thecommercial cities of Phoenicia” ( – ). Heywood goes on to quote Gibbon and citesRoscoe’s gure of Lorenzo di Medici in support of his argument.

. William Roscoe, An Address, Delivered before the Proprietors of the BotanicGarden, in Liverpool, previous to the opening the Garden, May , , to which areadded, the laws of the institution, and a list of proprietors (Liverpool: printed by J. M’Creery, ), , , and , respectively.

. See William Roscoe, Memoir of Richard Roberts Jones, of Aberdaron, in thecounty of Carnarvon, in North Wales; Exhibiting a Remarkable Instance of a PartialPower and Cultivation of Intellect (London: T. Cadell and J. and A. Arch, ).

. In his Liverpool Anti-Slavery Societypamphlet, Declaration of the Objects of theLiverpool Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (Liverpool: James Smith, ),Roscoe writes: “This Society is also induced to hope, that the local advantagesincident to a great commercial place, and the opportunities it affords of obtaininginformation respecting the present state of slavery in many parts of the world, andparticularly in the British Colonies, and the states of North and South America, willbe found to conduce in a considerable degree to the success of their labours. Withsuch motives and expectations, they have entered upon their task; and imploring thefavour of DIVINE PROVIDENCE, proceed to state the motives by which they areguided, and the objects which it will be their endeavour to attain” ( ).

. William Roscoe, “Mount Pleasant” [ ], from George Chandler’s WilliamRoscoe of Liverpool , ll. – .


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1 0 6 Eigh teenth-Century Life

. See William Roscoe, The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici; Called the Magnicent , vols. (London: A. Strahan, T. Cadell jun. and W. Davies, and J. Edwards, ).

For an account of the reception afforded by contemporaries to Roscoe’s historicalbiography, see Bullen, Myth of the Renaissance , – . Bullen compares Roscoe’s lifeof Lorenzo with that of the Swiss historian J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, and, while recognizing that Roscoe’s text had the virtue of being “eminently readable,” issharply critical of its lack of “imaginative breadth,” “detached empiricism,” and“rst-hand scholarship.” Bullen also laments the degree to which Roscoe reveals hisown particular circumstances and his naive reliance on “wise paternalism, liberalhumanism, and [a] belief in the triumph of learning over commerce, of reasonablerepublican government, and of self-improvement” ( , ). In drawing attention toRoscoe’s fabrication of a “myth” of benign individualism in Renaissance Florence,

Bullen underplays the strong connection between politics, commerce, and the arts inRoscoe’s vision of culture.. William Roscoe, Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici , : , : , : , : . Roscoe

makes a similar case for Lorenzo di Medici’s son, Pope Leo X, in his second majorhistorical biography. See Wil liam Roscoe,The Life and Ponticate of Leo the Tenth inFour Volumes , vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, ). Here he embarks onanother “history of the revival of learning” (ix) designed to “unfold the ever activeeffect of moral causes on the acquirements and happiness of a people” and to “raise abarrier” against “that torrent of a corrupt and vitiated taste” that “may once moreoverwhelm the cultivated nations of Europe with barbarism and degradation”(xxxvi). To this end, he celebrates Leo X for his “municent encouragement”afforded “to every department of polite literature and of elegant art” ( : ). Whileconceding that his subject may not be “gifted with those creative powers which areproperly characterized by the name of genius,” Roscoe claims that, “he may justly besaid to have displayed the highest species of talent” ( : ). As with the case ofLorenzo di Medici, he is keen to emphasize that the inuence of this highly giftedindividual has been made possible by a political context conducive to “freedom ofenquiry” and “liberty of opinion”( : ).

. See Roscoe, Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici : “The genius of Michelangelo was aleaven which was to operate on an immense and heterogeneous mass, the saltintended to give a relish to insipidity itself; it was therefore active, penetrating,energetic, so not only effectually to resist the contagious effects of a depraved taste,but to communicate a portion of its spirit to all around” ( : ).

. See J. E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-War Liberalism in England, – (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., ), – , – , – , – .

. William Roscoe, On the Origin and Vicissitudes of Literature, Science, and Art,and Their Inuence on the Present State of Society. A Discourse Delivered on the openingof the Liverpool Royal Institution, November (London, Cadell and Davies,

).


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Wil l iam Roscoe’s Liverpool 1 0 7

. The text of the letter is visible at the Library of Congress website, havingbeen featured in its bicentenary exhibition of Jefferson. See www.loc.gov/exhibits/

jefferson/ .html. See also William Roscoe,Observations on Penal Jurisprudence, andthe Reformation of Criminals. With an Appendix; Containing the latest reports of theState-Prison or Penitentiaries of Philadelphia, New York, and Massachusetts; and otherdocuments(London: T. Cadell and W. Davies Strand and John and Arthur Arch,

).. For an account of Roscoe’s participation in a “transatlantic community of

reform,” particularly in relation to penal reform, but also signicantly inuenced byshared allegiance to Scottish philosophy and to religious networks of Quakers andUnitarians, see Katherine M. R. Lloyd,Peace, Politics, and Philanthropy , – .

Documents

William Roscoe