Life & Wisdom Quote by M. E. W. Sherwood

Liverpool enters the sentence already convicted. Sherwood doesn’t arrive with a blank notebook; she arrives answering an accusation. “Ugly” isn’t just an aesthetic verdict here, it’s a social one - the kind of shorthand Victorian travel writing loved to use when it wanted to sneer at a working port city swollen by commerce, smoke, and migrants. By opening with “I did not find,” Sherwood frames herself as a reasonable witness in a trial, not a partisan booster. The line is defensive on Liverpool’s behalf, but it also flatters the speaker as discerning: she can see past the cliché.

The rhetoric pivots on “redeem.” That word quietly reveals the moral economy underneath the sightseeing. A city can be “charged” with ugliness as if it’s wrongdoing; it can be “redeemed” by monuments and civic architecture, as if beauty is evidence of character. Sherwood’s list - “stately public buildings, broad streets, public squares, and noble statues” - is a roll call of municipal legitimacy. These are the respectable surfaces of empire: order, symmetry, commemorations of great men. She’s not praising Liverpool’s messy vitality, its docks or crowds, but its attempts to look like a capital.

The subtext is anxious class politics dressed up as taste. Liverpool’s grandeur “redeems” it precisely because it signals governance, wealth, and self-improvement - a city asserting it is not merely a machine for trade. Sherwood records that performance, and, perhaps unintentionally, shows how often “beauty” is code for who gets to count as civilized.