ERabino - Manchester 1835 by A. de Tocqueville

Analysis of Manchester 1835 by Alexis de Tocqueville

The title, Manchester 1835, immediately sets the story in a specific place and time. Right from the start the reader knows the description concrns Manchester during the Industrial Revolution.

The first paragraph has the function to introduce the contrast between nature and man - made products, appearance and reality, wealth and poverty.

The narrator, who is a first person intrusive narrator, at first, provides a wonderful natural description of the city where rivers flow "slowly", "tranquil" and "lazy". But this is just an illusion: the intelligent reader can soon understand the adjectives have nothing to share with the process of industrialization. Indeed, by using the words "man" and "human" with a very disparaging attitude, the narrator reveals his negative judgment on man's work and society. Like C. Dickens  in Coketown, he criticizes people and the society he was living in because the only thing they really cared for  was money.

As the narrator goes on in the second paragraph, the situation and the contrast become clearer and more detailed. He started out by declaring that there were "thirty" or "forty" factories as if they were too many to count.  Moreover the use of the language of sense impression makes the reader feel as if he were there: he can see the factories from far away on "top" in opposition with the "uncultivated lands" around them; he can smell the "putrid" and "stagnant" stink of the waters; he can hear the noises from the industries.

The use of the language here is very significant and confirms once more the double face of the industrial revolution. The description of the factories is made up by using words which recall to the semantic field of greatness and magnificence: "rise","top","hills","tower","up","huge". All this is however is in opposition to  the "stretches","scratched","set apart "overshadowed","hideous","cellars","sunken" habitations around them.

The narrator wants to stick  the image of what being a common person in Manchester of 1835 was  like.

The technique of sense impression used in the first sentence connects the third paragraph to the second one. However, this time the narrator is more explicit. If in the previous paragraph he didn't declare his ideas but he made the reader find them out, here he shares his thoughts. He asserts that "there is the wealth of some, here the poverty of most". This sentence keeps all the contrasts that the intelligent reader may have been looking for: poverty of common people and wealth of capitalists, few or some: they who have power and ther lot of they who are basically slaves, there, so far away in that dreaming world and here, in  reality.

In the fourth and fifth paragraph the horrible sensation of what living in an industrial city so full of contradiction means seems to become reality. Language heavily appeals to the sense of hearing. A constant noise follows people. It is the thundering noise of the machineries in factories as well as in  workers' minds. The noise they cannot leave outside is the life of a "labyrinth"they can "never  escape" as the narrator suggests by repeating the adverb "never".

People are never happy, never free; they are always worried and they do not seem to conduct a human life any more.

The last paragraph is a conclusion and a further confirmation  of what the process of industrialization meant: "development" and "brutish", again a contradictory face. The ironic tone of the first sentence which seems to be a joke is lately broken by the criticism  of the writer. Men are responsible for what the rsult and they have themselves been turned into "savages", uncivilized people who forgot about moral values and virtues.