Description
Observing his experience having landed in Liverpool from Boston only a few days before, George Copway writes: “This, then, is a part of England. How crowded are the streets! What large truck horses! with plenty of omnibuses and noisy beggars; and worse than all, the shaving hack-drivers. Beardless as I am comparatively, they yet manage to shave me.” Copway is not specific about where along the several miles of docks of the Port of Liverpool he was resident, other than to note that he was comfortably ensconced with the Bostonian Rev. G. Pennell, and that “From my window I can see a thousand ships. They appear like forest trees, their masts towering between me and the great city.” Copway, an ex-methodist missionary, would travel throughout Britain on lecture and fundraising tours, writing about his experiences in Running Sketches of Men and Places, in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland (1851). A friend of such luminaries as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Copway became a notorious self-promoter. His writings, which include several other books and pamphlets, represent an important repository of relatively early Anishinaabe writing, and offer rich, astute, and often comical insight into his experiences in Britain and elsewhere, as well as his myriad ideas about improving the present and securing a future for his people.
Bibliographic sources
Donald B. Smith, Mississauga Portraits. Image by Unknown author – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs divisionunder the digital ID cph.3c21977. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40365436