Message on door people walk past every day has meaning we should all know about

A scrawled message on the door of a boarded-up Georgian building is the only marker of its key place in literary history.

People passing 118 Duke Street in Liverpool city centre may have spotted the words FELICIA HEMANS POET b HERE 1793, next to graffiti tags and a word alluding to false claims about the coronavirus pandemic.

It’s not the most elaborate or fitting memorial to one of our city’s most renowned poets but it’s a memorial all the same. Felicia Hemans, born in the property, was responsible for some of the best-known lines in English poetry, and was admired by some of the biggest names in the Late Romantic era.

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Her father, George Browne, was Tuscan and imperial consul in Liverpool while her mother Felicity was the daughter of the Venetian consul to the city. Not many early 19th century poets’ lives have links to I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!, but Hemans’ does – she and her family lived in the grounds of Gwrych Castle, the covid-era setting for the ITV show, when she was growing up in North Wales.

She went on to have her first poems published at 14, gaining the attention of Shelley, who shared an admiration for her work with Wordsworth. Her work became popular both in the UK and across the Atlantic and she moved to Dublin in 1831 before dying four years later of the fluid retention condition dropsy.

Her poetry was celebrated at the time, and she is credited with coining the phrase “stately home” in her 1827 work The Homes of England. The opening line to her 1826 poem Casablanca, “the boy stood on the burning deck”, is among the most famous and easily-recalled in English poetry.

Hemans’ life of extraordinary achievement, cruelly cut short at 41, surely deserves a better memorial in her home city than at present. However, a row at the turn of the 20th century centred on whether 118 Duke Street was indeed the correct birthplace.

A debate took place in the letters page of the Liverpool Daily Post, with contributors discussing a number of possible contenders – but 118 is now accepted as correct. She is remembered in Dublin through a plaque and stained-glass window at St Ann’s Church, while the University of Liverpool awarded the Felicia Hemans poetry prize in her honour.

But today, on the street where she was born in our city, there is little to remember her except for a handful of words on a door.

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