The writers have different aims in the description of Manchester: in her novel, J.Winterson  says that the city is a good place to be born and so she wants to show to the reader how beautiful it is; A.Tocqueville instead describes the city as a horrible place that  became so ugly  because of industrialization. A. Tocqueville wants to show the effect of the process on cities. J.Winterson set her novel in Manchester in the year  1959 during the Cold War and she presents it as a city full of contradictions. She says it is radical because of the influence of Marx and Engel but it’s also repressive and she tell us referring to the Corn Laws and the Massacre of Peterloo, it is a Utilitarian city because everything is subjected to the question “is it useful?” but it is also utopian. Indeed in the city a lot of protest movements like the one of the feminist was born.

Manchester is sounds a contradiction even from the also geographical point of view: it is in the shout of the north of England and it’s divided into two regions a part of the city is in the region of Cheshire and the other is in the region of Lancashire.

 J.Winterson therefore heavily relies on the theme of opposites to attract the interest of the reader toward his hometown and she calls on the reader to involve him in the story.

A.Tocqueville set his description in Manchester during the beginning of the Idustrial Revolution. He wants to show the degradation brought by the Inustrial Rvolution so he describe the landscape accurately and speaks direcly to the reader to explain the condition of the workers who worked a lot but lived in the misery while the capitalists became richer and richer.