Journeys to England and Ireland by Alexis de Tocqueville

Description of Manchester

The text proposed is an extract taken by Journeys to England and Ireland  realized by the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. So right from the beginning the reader knows that the text will be a description of Manchester from the point of view of the speaking voice, who will probably provide the description with his considerations about the place.

According to the structure of the extract, it is arranged into six different-length paragraphs, each of them develops a particular feature of the description. For example, the first paragraph consists of the look at the nature surrounding(and inside) the city while in the second one the narrator focuses his attention on the the human massive intervention on it, one of the most important result of the Industrial Revolution started in Britain in 1780.

Well  as I said before, in the first paragraph the speaking voice describes the typical environment in which Manchester is included, that is "a collection of little hills", "a narrow river", "a thousand bends".  So, the reader comes into direct contact with a nature organization which could aid the development of commerce( e.g. the presence of the river). That could be one of the main cause of the development of Manchester as a big industrial city, the first one.

In this beautiful nature human beings built "palaces and hovels", without any restrictions( "At every turn human liberty shows its capricious creative force"), probably because of the increase of working population after the enclosure system of lands and the consolidation of small farms into larger ones.

In the second paragraph, the longest in the text, Tocqueville aims to convey to the reader the building of the city environment after the coming of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed he said that "Thirty or forty factories rise on the tops of the hills" and  "The land is given over to industry's use". So right from the last sentence we understand that industry became of vital importance for the sustainment of the population.  On the other side, however, the reader  discovers the terrible conditions of workers among the city, who were very little wages and hard lives. It is the main effect of the new economic system, capitalism, which brought the improvement of conditions of factory owners and urban merchants and the decrease of laborers' ones, as summed up by the narrator's sentence "home of vice and poverty". According to this, the reader understand that Tocqueville has a negative opinion about Manchester and he condemns the consequences of capitalism and the great spread between rich and poor people( the same thing is also thought by Charles Dickens in Hard Times, description of Cocketown).

Going on reading, the third and the fourth paragraphs show the reader Manchester into depth, that is it is a city struck by high level of pollution( "The fetid, muddy waters") where you can hear the typical noises of and industrialized city, such as "the noise of furnaces, the whistle of steam". So, by using the sentence Tocqueville appeals to the use of sense,  in particular of hearing, in order to convey as well as possible detailed description of the city and help the reader the create its image in his mind. However, the speaking voice affirms again his negative vision of Manchester , confirmed by expressions like "A sort of black smoke covers the city", so he keep underlining the terrible living conditions in that city.

Considering now the last two paragraphs, in the fifth paragraph it is said that you never hear the scream of happy people or their foot walking, because they are totally covered by the high-level noises of the furnaces and steam-engines. Therefore people seem to have no social life, that is they are only obliged to work and work.( "their appearance sombre and harsh").

In the last paragraph  the speaking voice explains what is called "the double face of capitalism" and its consequences over Manchester, in the sense of: the new economic system led to the increase of wealth of urban merchants and factory owners( "From this filthy sewer pure gold flows"), on the other hand it brought to the decrease of the living and working conditions of laborers, which were considered like animals.