From Picture of Liverpool: Strangers Guide, written in 1834
It was in the month of July 1815 that the first steam vessel employed on the river Mersey arrived here and compared with the present splendid and swift sailing steam packets, was truly an inferior production. The expedious and regular communication occasioned by steam navigation has conduced much to the influx of strangers and the transacting of business, for ordinaritly a person may leave Liverpool in the evening and be seated at breakfast the following morning in Dublin: and a similar facility of transit at present exists to most of the prinicpal towns and cities on the coasts of Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Distances that formerly required a voyage of six or seven days, are now passed over in little more than so many hours: and if we compare the amount of business at the present time carried out in this port with that of any other former period we shall perceive that the consequent increase of trade is at least commensurate with the means of conveyance
But the advantages arising from this improvement are most strikingly demonstrated by that class of steam vessels, which from morning till night are unceasingly passing from the piers on this side to the opposite part of Cheshire, by means of which thousands of people are daily going to and fro, with nearly the same ease and certainty as if a bridge were thrown across.
Hence have arisen in the hundred of Wirrall within a short space of time numerous habitations, and many of them elegant, besides several manufactories, that otherwise would in all probability have never been called into existence
Every day from an early hour in the morning until dusk in the evening, numerous steam boats are constantly sailing between the several parades on this side of the river, and the following ferries in Cheshire viz. Tranmere, Birkenhead, Woodside, Seacombe and Egremont