Analysis of Manchester 1835 by Alexis de Tocqueville
The title, Manchester 1835, immediately sets the story in a specific place and time. Right from the start the reader knows that the novel will take place in Manchester during the industrial revolution. 
The first paragraph has the function to introduce the contrast between nature and man, appearance and reality, wealth and poverty. The narrator, who is a first person intrusive narrator, at first, provides a wonderful natural description of the city where rivers flow "slowly", "tranquil" and "lazy". But this is just an illusion: the intelligent reader may understand that these adjectives have nothing to share with the process of industrialization. Indeed the narrator, by using the words "man" and "human" with a very disparaging attitude, reveals his negative judgment on man's work and society. He, as Dickens does in Coketown, criticizes people and the society he was living in because the only thing they really care about was appearance.
As the narrator goes on in the second paragraph, the situation and the contrast become clearer and more detailed. He started out by declaring that there were "thirty" or "forty" factories as if they were too many to count.  Moreover the use of sense impression makes the reader feel as if he were there: he can see the factories far away on "top" in opposition with the "uncultivated lands" around them; he can smell the "putrid" and "stagnant" stink of the waters; he can hear the noises from the industries. The use of the language in this paragraph is very significant and confirms one more time the double face of the industrial revolution. The description of the factories is made up by using words which recall to the semantic field of greatness and magnificence: "rise","top","hills","tower",“up”,“huge". All this though is in opposition with the "stretches","scratched","set apart","overshadowed","hideous","cellars","sunken" habitations around them. The narrator wants to stick into the reader's mind the image of what being a common person in Manchester of 1835 would be like. 
The technique of sense impression used in the first sentence connects the third paragraph to the second one. However, this time the narrator is more explicit. If in the previous paragraph he didn't declare his ideas but he made the reader find them out, here he shares his thoughts. He asserts that "there is the wealth of some, here the poverty of most". This sentence keeps all the contrasts that the intelligent reader may have been looking for: poverty of common people and wealth of capitalists, few or some who have power and a lot who are basically slaves, there, so far away in that dreaming world and here, in the reality. 
In the fourth and fifth paragraph the horrible sensation of what living in an industrial city so full of contradiction means seems to become reality. Most of the terms refer to the sense of hearing. A constant noise follows people. It is the thundering noise of the machineries that sticks into workers' minds. That noise that they can't leave outside is the life in that "labyrinth" that they can "never escape" as the narrator suggests by repeating the adverb "never". People are never happy, never free; they are always preoccupied and they have no life any more.
The last paragraph is a conclusion and a further confirm of what the process of industrialization gave birth to: "development" and "brutish", again the double face. The ironic tone of the first sentence which seems to be a joke is lately broken by the accuse to men. They are responsible for what has happened and they themselves are turning into "savages", uncivilized people who forgot about moral values and virtues.