ANALYSIS OF MANCHESTER (1835) BY ALEXIS TOCQUEVILLE

Right from the title the reader may expect the text to be a description of an industrialized city. Such expectation is created by the noun “Manchester” and by the date used.  So the author, uses a space and a time references in order to put his text in the context of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed Manchester, was the first industrialized city because of the workers’ urbanisation due to the consolidation of small factories into big ones and to the enclosure of cultivated and waste lands.

According to the layout the text consists is arranged into six paragraphs with different length and function.

The aim of the text is to describe the tactical sensation of observing the booming mill town of Manchester.

The first paragraph portrays the landscape of Manchester, that is an undulating plain, or rather a collection of little hills and it has got a narrow river, the Irwell, and two streams, the Meddlock and the Irk.

The narrator uses words belonging to the semantic field of nature, so it seem as if Manchester had natural and peaceful landscape. Such consideration is also created by the use of adjectives like slowly, tranquil, and lazy.

The rise of the Industrial Revolution is introduced with a change of the semantics. Men began to build a lot of palaces, factories and houses(“palaces and hovels”) , in order to give work to the thousand of labourers come into town especially because of the enclosure of cultivated fields. That happened because the Industrial Revolution led to the development of an Agrarian Revolution.

The narrator’s opinion about artificial devices is here quoted.

Indeed the word scattered reminds the idea of confusion and mess, conveying his bad point of view above industrialization .

Moreover the idea of the double faced nature of Manchester is created through the contraposition of two terms: palaces and hovels: the Industrial Revolution produced wealth without producing well being .

Going on, the second paragraph continues the previous contraposition between the artificial landscape and the natural one, keeping the reader’s mind focused on the industrial development of the city, in the sense of: a lot of factories were built in few years, causing Manchester to become the first industrial city of the world. However, the narrator underlines at the same time the hard living conditions of labourers, which were constricted to work several hours a day and to live in very badly built houses. That’s one of the consequences of the new economic system, which we can sum up by using the word “capitalism”.

In the third and fourth paragraphs Tocqueville describes Manchester going into depth.

In particular the narrator highlights the high level of pollution which infected the city and at the same time the typical noises of an industrialized city, made by steam engines( the first invented by James Watt) and blast furnaces( invented between 1740-1750). So, by the analysis of the second paragraph and these last two, the reader simply comes into touch with the negative vision of the narrator about the transformation of the city after the birth of the Industrial Revolution. Sentences like “A sort of black smoke covers the city” helps to convey the reader how hard and health-dangerous living in Manchester was for that time.

Well, the fifth paragraph continues developing what is affirmed in the previous ones, that is the noises of the factories cover all the people “social actions”, such as walking or screaming for some reasons. What’s more, it seems as if people have only to work, without the possibility of having a bit of fun.

According now to the last paragraph, the speaking voice sums up all the content of the text, by explaining us the contradictions which are typical of Manchester, first of all the high difference brought by capitalism between rich and poor people.

So, it has the function to synthesize the double faced nature of Manchester; Manchester has a lot of shapes because here humanity attains its most complete development but at the same time its more brutish.