Manchester in J. Winterson and A. Tocqueville: comparison

In the second chapter of the book ‘Why be happy when you could be normal’ there is the description of Manchester, the world’s first industrial city. Jeanette Winterson, the book’s writer, highlights the contradictory nature of her birth town where lived both rich and poor people as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. Manchester had canals, easy access to the great port of Liverpool in order to let a better transport of goods.  J.Winterson also creates a contradiction in the use of the words; for example: ‘south/north, untamed/unmetropolitan, connected/worldly, radical/repressive’.  According to the writer Manchester was all mix. This city had a positive meaning for the Celts who worshipped the river goddess of Medlock. “This was Mam-ceaster  and Mam is mother, is breast , is force … energy.”  To the north and east of Manchester were the Pennines, the wild rough low mountain range that runs through the north of England where men and women lived solitary, often fugitive lives.  Manchester was partly in Lancashire  and partly in Cheshire, making it a double city rooted in contradictions. According to J. Winterson Manchester “was a good place to be born”.  J.Winterson and A. Tocqueville give different judgments on Manchester because of their different period of living and writing. J. Winterson remembers in her memoir, the sixties Manchester; while A. Tocqueville wrote his description in the nineteenth century. Doubtless, the more useful idea of Manchester is given by A. Tocqueville because his vision is more descriptive. Alexis De Tocqueville’s vision of Manchester is an extract from Journeys to England and Ireland. He condemns industrialization, he criticizes the architecture of the period. In his essay he gives an implicit contrast between natural rivers and artificial canals, made by man. He presents Manchester from a natural point of view. He gives a negative judgment of Manchester. After introducing the problem, he tries to support his thesis. Human liberty is criticized because it is capricious: there was no plan for the city, each built where he wanted. He condemns the government because it does not intervene to organize the spread of the Industrialization in the town. Then, he focuses the reader’s impression on the noise of the system production. Readers are involved into the process by the use of the language of sense impression: the narrator makes you see, hear, smell. “A sort of black smoke covers the city, a thousand noises disturb this dark: the shriek of steam from boilers, the regular beat of the looms, the heavy rumble of carts. Those were the noises from which you could never escape.” Life’s conditions of Manchester’s inhabitants were hard. Men and women exhausted, drunken, worked twelve hours shifts six days a week, losing arms, legs, fingers.