ABSTRACT
Little is known of John Walker, except the tantalising information supplied in the preface and the text of his only published work, A Descriptive Poem on the Town and Trade of Liverpool. Employed as a journeyman shoemaker, he expresses enthusiasm for the benefits that the profits of Liverpool's expanding economy—chiefly in the slave tradehave brought to labouring-class Liverpudlians. There are no surviving records of his publisher, Henry Hodgson, and the preface to A Descriptive Poem omits the names of Walker's 'generous benefactors and subscribers', perhaps at their own request, given the text's unfashionably strident defence of slavery at a time of increasing support for the abolitionist campaign. There is more to Walker's long loco-descriptive georgic poem than its defence of slavery. It opens with an extended meditation on history and consequences of Liverpool's expansion as a trading port, and although excluded from the present selection, a tribute paid by speaker to a sailor friend lost at sea is particularly affecting.
