...Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.

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 trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled¹. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

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 rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these.

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful². If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse³ of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple⁴ over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. 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. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.

The Condition of the Working Class in England shone a bright light on the most unsavoury consequences of England's industrial transformation. (German visitor Friedrich Engels's) account of mid-19th-century Manchester was uncompromising: a place of dirt, squalid¹ over-crowding, and exploitation. The historic heart of Manchester he described as a place of ‘filth², ruin, and uninhabitableness', it was, quite simply, ‘Hell upon Earth'.

Middle-class commentators took a uniformly bleak view of Manchester, but it is important to note that many working-class inhabitants viewed their city in a far more positive light. In a large town it was possible to attend a night school or to worship³ at whatever church one chose. It was possible to join a union⁴, or even a political society, and start to shape the society in which one lived. William Aitken described his fellow Manchester Chartists as the ‘sons of freedom'. Manchester may have been dirty, noisy and over-crowded, but for many workers the combination of relatively good wages and a lively cultural scene provided ample compensation for these drawbacks.