Learning Paths » 5A Interacting
Manchester An Industrial City: Tocqueville's Manchester
by - (2012-10-07)
Up to 5A - Manchester An Industrial City: A Case Study in European History . 
Manchester from ‘'Journeys to England and Ireland'' (1835) by Alexis Tocqueville
Alexis Tocqueville starts his description of Manchester with an illustration of its landscape. Reading the first paragraph the reader imagines rivers, hills, innocent canals made by man (useful mean of communication) when there was still a balance between nature and ‘'art''. Then the reader finds out that the writer have a negative opinion about the capitalist society considered as ‘' the individual powers of man; nothing the directing power of society''.
The second paragraph shows the terrible consequences of the ‘'centralization of industry''. The frantic need to build and gain more and faster destroyed Manchester's population and nature. Ironically more big capitalists continued to build factories and attached, more the city was falling apart. Poor people, twenty or fifteen together, lived in miserable dwellings ‘'between poverty and death''. Pollution was also an ignored problem: ‘' The fetid, muddy waters, stained with a thousand colours by the factories they pass'', ‘' marshy land which widely spaced ditches can neither drain nor cleanse'', ‘' A sort of black smoke covers the city. The sun seen through it is a disc without rays''.
Manchester is called two times ‘' a noisome, dark, damp labyrinth'' and one of its road ‘'the Stynx of Hades''.
As in Dickens' Coketown the city is enveloped by an infernal atmosphere. At the end of the third paragraph the writer discusses one of the negative consequence of capitalism, the unequal distribution of wealth and the primacy of the gain: ‘' here is the slave, there the master; there is the wealth of some, here the poverty of most; there the organised efforts of thousands produce, to the profit of one man, what society has not yet learnt to give. Here the weakness of the individual seems more feeble and helpless even than in the middle of a wilderness.''
The statement ‘' they are not at all the ordinary sounds one hears in great cities'' is explained in the next paragraph in that Manchester is not a city any more and there aren't the tipical sounds and figures of a city. Also population's life is radically changed : ‘' Crowds are ever hurrying this way and that in the Manchester streets, but their footsteps are brisk their looks preoccupied, and their appearance sombre and harsh. ...''
The last paragraph contains the writers judgment and in my opinion is the perfect synthesis of extreme industrialization: ‘' From this filthy sewer pure gold flows''.
Alexis Tocqueville starts his description of Manchester with an illustration of its landscape. Reading the first paragraph the reader imagines rivers, hills, innocent canals made by man (useful mean of communication) when there was still a balance between nature and ‘'art''. Then the reader finds out that the writer have a negative opinion about the capitalist society considered as ‘' the individual powers of man; nothing the directing power of society''.
The second paragraph shows the terrible consequences of the ‘'centralization of industry''. The frantic need to build and gain more and faster destroyed Manchester's population and nature. Ironically more big capitalists continued to build factories and attached, more the city was falling apart. Poor people, twenty or fifteen together, lived in miserable dwellings ‘'between poverty and death''. Pollution was also an ignored problem: ‘' The fetid, muddy waters, stained with a thousand colours by the factories they pass'', ‘' marshy land which widely spaced ditches can neither drain nor cleanse'', ‘' A sort of black smoke covers the city. The sun seen through it is a disc without rays''.
Manchester is called two times ‘' a noisome, dark, damp labyrinth'' and one of its road ‘'the Stynx of Hades''.
As in Dickens' Coketown the city is enveloped by an infernal atmosphere. At the end of the third paragraph the writer discusses one of the negative consequence of capitalism, the unequal distribution of wealth and the primacy of the gain: ‘' here is the slave, there the master; there is the wealth of some, here the poverty of most; there the organised efforts of thousands produce, to the profit of one man, what society has not yet learnt to give. Here the weakness of the individual seems more feeble and helpless even than in the middle of a wilderness.''
The statement ‘' they are not at all the ordinary sounds one hears in great cities'' is explained in the next paragraph in that Manchester is not a city any more and there aren't the tipical sounds and figures of a city. Also population's life is radically changed : ‘' Crowds are ever hurrying this way and that in the Manchester streets, but their footsteps are brisk their looks preoccupied, and their appearance sombre and harsh. ...''
The last paragraph contains the writers judgment and in my opinion is the perfect synthesis of extreme industrialization: ‘' From this filthy sewer pure gold flows''.