Читать книгу Recollections of a Busy Life: Being the Reminiscences of a Liverpool Merchant 1840-1910 - Forwood William Bower - Страница 6

Liverpool occupies the unique position of having filled two important places in the history of England. There was, firstly, the little town clustered round about its castle, and holding a charter from King John dated 1207, its estuary affording a safe haven for the trifling commerce passing between England and its sister island, Ireland. Thus situated it had to bear its part in the political movements and the foreign and civil wars which for long years harassed and distressed the country and checked its progress. Although the six centuries which intervened between 1200 and 1800 are filled with many incidents which clothe this portion of the history of Liverpool with much that is picturesque and romantic, at the close of the eighteenth century we still find Liverpool a small if not insignificant place, with a population in 1790 of only 55,000, while the tonnage of her shipping was only 49,541 tons.

This may be said to close the history of "old" Liverpool. With the dawn of the nineteenth century a new Liverpool sprang into existence. The opening of the American trade, the peace of 1814, and the introduction of steamships, gave an enormous impetus to the growth of the trade of the port and laid the foundations of that vast and world-wide commerce which has made the name of Liverpool synonymous with the greatest achievements in commerce and in science. The building of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the mother of railways, the docks, and the bridging of the Atlantic by what is practically a steam ferry, will ever stand out as epoch making.

Thus in little over a hundred years Liverpool has grown from a small town into a great city, the city of to-day.