“There is not a more curious place in the world”

The title of this website and blog is inspired by this verdict on Chester by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who’s regarded as being one of the most important American authors of the 19th Century. He was appointed as US Consul to Liverpool in 1853, following the election of his friend Franklin Pierce as the 14th President of the United States, and arrived in Liverpool with his wife and three children in July of that year.

While the Consulate was in Paradise Street in Liverpool city centre (the building now houses the Cote Bistro in the Liverpool 1 shopping centre), Hawthorne and his wife chose to live in Rock Ferry and so he commuted to Liverpool on the half-hourly steam ferry across the Mersey.

The role of Liverpool consul was regarded as being the most lucrative US foreign service position as he was able to charge fees for consular services and Liverpool was then the focus of transatlantic trade. The role mainly involved verifying official documents related to US trade with other nations by means of his signature, leading him to write in his journal,

The autograph of a living author has seldom been so much in request at so respectable a price…Heaven prosper the trade between America and Liverpool!

On 1st October 1853 Hawthorne made his first visit to Chester, travelling by train in the company of a certain Mr Tricknor, who was visiting him while en route from Europe to North America via Liverpool. Freshly arrived from his home in New Hampshire – part of the region of New England – Hawthorne's first impression of the city was,

It is quite an indescribable old town, and I feel at last as if I had had a glimpse of old England.

Just as many visitors to Chester still do today, Hawthorne and Ticknor started with a stroll around the city walls, remarking how its suburbs, interspersed by green spaces and rural vistas, had grown up outside the walls and how the walls no longer served a defensive purpose:

It is all very strange, very quaint, very curious to see how the town has overflowed its barrier, and how, like many institutions here, the ancient wall still exists, but is turned to quite another purpose than what it was meant for,--so far as it serves any purpose at all.

They then went to the cathedral, which would have been in a poor state of repair before its major restoration in the 1870s:

The cloisters gave us the strongest impression of antiquity; the stone arches being so worn and blackened by time. Still an English must always have imagined a better cathedral than this…In the chapter-house we found a coal-fire burning in a grate, and a large heap of old books--the library of the cathedral--in a discreditable state of decay,--mildewed, rotten, neglected for years.

Toward the end of their visit they visited the Rows which, despite their antiquity, Hawthorne predicted would survive, particularly as they provided certain commercial advantages to the traders that occupied them:

This fashion of Rows does not appear to be going out; and, for aught I can see, it may last hundreds of years longer. When a house becomes so old as to be untenantable, it is rebuilt, and the new one is fashioned like the old, so far as regards the walk running through its front. Many of the shops are very good, and even elegant, and these Rows are the favorite places of business in Chester. Indeed, they have many advantages, the passengers being sheltered from the rain, and there being within the shops that dimmer light by which tradesmen like to exhibit their wares.

Hawthorne and his companion considered dining in one of the old taverns in the city, but “on inspection, they looked rather too dingy and close, and of questionable neatness”. So, instead they went to the Royal Hotel next to the Eastgate (now the Grosvenor Hotel), where, “we probably fared just as badly at much more expense, and where there was a particularly gruff and crabbed old waiter, who, I suppose, thought himself free to display his surliness because we arrived at the hotel on foot” rather than in a carriage.

Despite the rudeness of the waiter, whose attitude he described as being typical 'John Bull' – that nationalist personification of an Englishman – Hawthorne concluded,

I must go again and again and again to Chester, for I suppose there is not a more curious place in the world.