The presence of William Roscoe in Redburn is a thin but durable thread in Herman Melville's montage of the city of Liverpool. Roscoe makes a covert appearance in The Picture of Liverpool, the actual travel book that Melville's father had used in his visits to the port. Liverpool had dissolved its formal connection to the slave trade a generation earlier, so that imperial emancipation was for Liverpool largely symbolic. Instead of investing in slave ships, the city's principal wealth derived largely from marketing slave‐produced American cotton, traded on the Merchants Exchange quadrangle. Despite the horrors of British white poverty and its history of involvement in African slavery, Liverpool remained for Melville more advanced in its racial diversity than New York or the rest of America, and he was prepared to use Redburn's seeming naïveté to mask his sly exposure of American bigotry.
Roscoe and The Picture of Liverpool
Herman Melville ; 559-574
2020-09-01
16 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
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