John H. McFadden and His Age: Cotton and Culture in Philadelphia
Richard Carreño 304pp.19 black and white illustrations. Camino Books, Philadelphia, 2021. Available from Amazon £18.69 hardback. ISBN: 978-1680980394.
I consider myself a reasonably well-read amateur Liverpool historian but confess that, until recently, I had never heard of John H McFadden. And, I suspect, neither had any of my fellow local history friends. This despite the fact that he and brother George headed up the biggest firm of cotton dealers not just in Liverpool during the late Victorian and early Edwardian era when the city was indisputably “King Cotton”, but on both sides of the Atlantic.
Like John Howard McFadden’s life itself, this is a book of two halves covering his early and later years in Philadelphia and his two decades or so in Liverpool when he was at the height of his cotton dealing powers. In spite of his business success and the great wealth that went with it, McFadden largely lived his life under the radar. So, it is thanks to Carreño that he has managed to tease out so much of the detail of his life. Aside from dealing in cotton futures, McFadden had three main passions, and the money to indulge them: medical research (of which Liverpool was a major beneficiary), polar exploration (and in particular Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton) and assembling an outstanding private collection of 18th and 19th century British paintings by the great masters, including one by Liverpool horse painter George Stubbs.