A stone's throw from Liverpool's magnificent civic architecture and bustling promenades lay the filthy, cramped courts and grimy cellars, a ‘nether world’ teeming with desperate individuals fighting for economic survival. Social investigator and sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick was appalled at the distribution of wealth in a town that could spend tens of thousands of pounds on civic monuments such as St George's Hall, while the streets were full of sewage, open latrines and overflowing cesspools. Liverpool was the capital of squalor. In few places in the country was the population more overcrowded, poverty more pressing, housing more wretched, drunkenness so widespread and prostitution so shameless.

To appreciate the brutality, boisterousness and vulgarity of Liverpool's early inhabitants, it is important to understand how the town once made its money. In the eighteenth century Liverpool's maritime industry was split between Greenland whaling ventures, slavery and privateering. None of these enterprises was for the faint-hearted. Any town teeming with ‘fierce privateersmen, inhuman slavers, reckless merchantmen, and violent men-of-war's men’ was bound to produce a tough, ruthless and bloodthirsty populace. Even children were brought up in a culture of grasping violence. This was the view of James Stonehouse who was born around 1770 and published a history of the town at the ripe age of 93. Recalling his childhood, he explained: ‘it was a cruel time, and the effects of the slave-trade and privateering were visible in the conduct of the lower classes and of society generally’. The barbarity is best reflected in the amusements of the time: prize-fighting, bull-baiting, cock-fighting and dog-fighting.