ABSTRACT
Central to de Tocqueville’s vision of Manchester is the contrast he found between “the palaces of industry” and the squalid dwellings of the poor, by whose labor the splendor of those “palaces” was maintained. Their houses, situated on the least desirable marshy land, seem “the last refuge a man might find between poverty and death,” yet even the “damp, repulsive holes” of their cellars are “crowded pell-mell.” More significantly, the palace-like factories “keep air and light out of the human habitations which they dominate; they envelope them in perpetual fog; here is the slave, there the master.”6 Here de Tocqueville touches on an aspect of Manchester that gave rise to deep concern among observers in the 1830s and 1840s. To an increasing number of visitors it seemed that the great leaders of industry, in their pride, self-reliance and single-minded pursuit of wealth, were blind or indifferent to the great suffering that lay round them. It was as if the fog that kept light and air from the
dwellings of the poor also rendered them invisible to the rich. In 1839, Canon Parkinson, a local man, pointed out that “there is no town in the world where the distance between the rich and the poor is so great, or the barrier between them so difficult to be crossed.”7 Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844-5), follows de Tocqueville in linking that distance between the classes to the very geography of Manchester.
