Metropolis by Ben Wilson

Author:Ben Wilson [Wilson, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

“Manchester is the chimney of the world,” wrote General Charles Napier in 1839. “Rich rascals, poor rogues, drunken ragamuffins and prostitutes form the moral; soot made into paste by rain the physique; and the only view is a long chimney: what a place! the entrance to hell realised!”1

In the Manchester of the 1840s over 500 chimneys exhaled a thick blanket of coal smoke, powering new technologies of mass production. Alexis de Tocqueville marvelled in horror at Manchester’s “huge palaces of industry” and the “noise of furnaces, the whistle of steam.” Such a city had never been seen before. Every day the sound of thousands of power looms reverberated through it, shaking the buildings. The Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer captured the restless force of the industrial urban Frankenstein and its sensory impact: “Manchester appeared to my eyes like a colossal spider, in the midst of its factories, towns, suburbs and villages, in which everything seemed to be spinning—spinning—spinning clothes for all the people in the world. There she sat, that Queen of spiders, surrounded by a mass of ugly houses and factories, veiled in a thick cloud of rain, not unlike a spider’s web. It produced a dark, oppressive impression on me.”2

Bremer also visited Chicago. The American colossus, she wrote, was “one of the most miserable and ugly cities” in the world. It did not deserve the title “Queen of the Lake,” she commented acidly, “for sitting there on the shore of the lake in wretched dishabille, she resembles rather a huckstress than a queen.”3

Like Manchester, Chicago’s cityscape, with its ribbons of railroad tracks radiating from the city and tangle of telegraph lines, its monumental grain elevators and lumberyards, its noisome stockyards, steel mills and factory chimneys, was nineteenth-century industrialism made manifest. Visitors commented that Chicago sounded like no other city in the world, with the “deep hollow roar of the locomotive and the shrill scream from the steamboat” mingling with the clatter of industry, the squeals of thousands of hogs about to be slaughtered and the uproar of the incessant crowds. Others experienced the power of Chicago throbbing “with an unbridled violence.” A French visitor felt the stench of Chicago grab him by the throat as soon as he arrived.4

Size, population growth and sensory assault were one thing. Much more daunting was what these new cities did to humanity. Manchester—“Cottonopolis”—stood at the heart of the global textile industry, ground zero in the history of worldwide industrialisation. The sight of Manchester’s mills was a harbinger of humankind’s future: “Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish,” wrote de Tocqueville, “here civilisation makes its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.”5

On one side of the Atlantic, in the American South, slaves were mobilised to grow, harvest and pack cotton; on the other, an industrial workforce numbering in the hundreds of thousands was coerced to turn it into textiles. They were wage earners, dependent on the factory system. Women and children were favoured because they could

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