ACTIVITY I

- Buildings: red brick; tall chimneys; vast piles of building full of windows; chapels; New Church; jail; infirmary; town hall; M'Choakumchild school; House of Commons; furnaces.

 

- Land: streets all like one another

 

- Water: black canal; river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye

ACTIVITY II

Examples of accumulation and contrast:

-"It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage."

 

- "It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke railed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled."

 

- "Large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another"

 

- "The piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness."

 

- "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 mentioned."

 

- "The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial."

Comparing C. Dickens' Coketown with A. Tocqueville's Manchester:

C.Dickens' aim is to describe a fictionary town that will remind the reader to the stereotype of the "industrial town" in the Victorian Age. The text is a narrative extract from the novel "Hard Times" and the writer appeals to the senses right from the introduction to make the city more lively, he adopts a third person omniscient intrusive narrator and uses binary oppositions and symbolical meanings all over the description.

C.Dickens gives to the reader an alienated vision of Coketown and underlines the material approach to life adopted in the period.

A.Tocqueville's description of Manchester is an extract from "Journeys to England and Ireland", a sort of "personal diary". He gives a detailed geographical description in the introduction and gives to the reader many data that he recorded during his travel to Manchester. The writer criticizes industrialization from a detached point of view because, being french, he is not living the process of industrialization yet.

As well as C.Dickens, A.Tocqueville makes the reader the reader imagine the place appealing to senses (mainly sight), he makes a contrast between the natural landscape and the artificial work of man, claiming that the individual power of man may change nature and tells that Manchester celebrates the triumph of individual against society.

Both writers give a negative judgement to the city and to industrialization from a different point of view: C.Dickens is living the Industrial Revolution day by day while A.Tocqueville is a foreigner visitor.

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