ACTIVITY 1
C.Dickens Chapter V

BUILDINGS: red bricks, machinery and tall chimneys, serpents of smoke, buildings full of windows, large and small streets, no differences between jail and infirmary
WATER: black canal, purple because of the dye

A. de Tocqueville Manchester (1835)
BUILDINGS: scattered palaces and hovels, thirty or forty six storied factories producing steam and fog, roads full of puddles and ruts, narrow and twisting, immense workshops, cellars damp and repulsive
LAND: collection of little hills, uneven ground, damp land, uncultivated land round dwellings
WATER: narrow river, streams with numerous bends, fetid, muddy, stained with colors by industries

ACTIVITY 2
Examples of accumulation
-It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke
trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a
river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye [...]
-The fetid, muddy waters, stained with a thousand colours by the factories they pass, of one of the streams I mentioned before, wander slowly round this refuge of poverty.

Both descriptions, through the accumulation of details , underlines the bad impact industrialization, and so man, had on nature.

Examples of contrasts

-  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 wildernes

In this assertion the intelligent reader may notice that the narrator uses the contrast here-there as a metaphor for those few wealthy people (capitalists) and most of these common people (workers). He wants to underline the disparity that the industiral revolution has brought.

- From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilization makes its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage

In this sentence the narrator wants to underline the double face of Manchester

-Everything in the exterior appearance of the city attests the individual powers of man; nothing the directing power of society

In this paragraph the contrast is between industrialization and individualism. No one cares about society everyone thinks about himself.

- An undulating plain, or rather a collection of little hills. Below the hills a narrow river (the Irwell), which flows slowly to the Irish sea. Two streams (the Meddlock and the Irk) wind through the uneven ground and after a thousand bends, flow into the river. Three canals made by man unite their tranquil, lazy waters at the same point. On this watery land, which nature and art have contributed to keep damp, are scattered palaces and hovels.

In the overture of Toqcueville's text, the contrast between the wonderful landscape and the three canals is a metaphor for the contrast between natural and unnatural, thus nature and what has been created by men.

CONCLUSION
Comparing both texts, even though they describe different cities, I have realized how similar they are. Both narrators criticize the society they were living in only focused on appearance and facts. It was a society where no one cared about someone else anymore; it was a society where a human being was less important than production; it was life for few people and a nightmare for the most.
I found really interesting and involving the techniques of sense impression that both narrators use. It allows the reader to create in his mind a clear image of what it's going on and make him feel as if he were there, in the text.
Last but not least I noticed that both narrators are intrusive and omniscient and so the reader is not free to have his own ideas without being effected by the narrators' negative judgments.