ACTIVITY I:

MANCHESTER BY ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

BUILDINGS: scattered palaces and hotel, thirty or forty factories rise on the top of the hills, roads are full of ruts and puddles, immense workshops, narrow and twisting roads and cellars damp and repulsive.

WATER: narrow river, streams with bends, canals, putrid, fetid, muddy and stained water.

LAND: a collection of little hills, uneven ground, land damp, land uncultivated.

CHARLES DICKENS' HARD TIMES, CHAPTER V

BUILDINGS: it was a town of red brick, of unnatural red and black, of machinery and tall chimneys, vast piles of building full of windows, several large streets, many small streets, the jail might have been the infirmary and the infirmary might have been the jail.

WATER: it had black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye.

ACTIVITY II:

ACCUMULATION AND CONTRAST IN CHARLES DICKENS' EXCTRACT

•·         It was a town of red brick, a town of unnatural red and black, a town of machinery and tall chimneys.

•·         Interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever.

•·         It had black canal in it, and there were vast piles of building full of windows.

•·         Large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another.

•·         These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentionated.

A. Tocqueville and C. Dickens express their negative point of view about Manchester and Coketown. A. Tocqueville describes Manchester from a geographical point of view and then he examines the condition of the city after the Industrial Revolution. The town described by C. Dickens is a fictional city, a product of his imagination and the narrator wants to make the reader able to imagine the setting. He uses a technique of telling and to sum up the effects of the Industrial Revolution the narrator uses a simile: he says that Coketown ‘s reminded " The pointed face of the savage". Both language use are meant to convey a negative vision of the town. He also says that the town becomes significantly its uniform architecture, it is made of the machinery and this focuses the reader attention on the noise of the system of production. This is exactly what A. Tocqueville had underline too.

Last but not least both narrators adopt the third personal omniscient intrusive narrator. Indeed, C. Dickens, in his description, uses two opposite colours: red which symbolizes blood and suffering and black which symbolizes darkness and hell.

Both narrator describe a society where the production is more important than human being. They describe a city that celebrates the individual power  against the society, against the community.