Manchester is a city of warehouses, that's the key, we decide, walking through the city centre. A city of warehouses, and what warehouses! The ones closest to the centre were built in the style of palazzi of Renaissance Italy, the new merchant princes of Manchester seeing themselves as descendants of the Italian princes of the city-states.
The Florence of the nineteeth century: that's what they called Manchester back then, W. reads in our guidebook. And you can see it, just about, even after the destruction of the Blitz. The money that was once here! The confidence!
Cottonpolis, that's what they called Victorian Manchester. The city of cotton, the city of banking, the city of the vast Royal Exchange, in which 10,000 traders could buy and sell stocks and shares on the foreign market. The city of the department stores, of the new retail chains.
It was the model of a new kind of city, Manchester. Self-made manufacturing families, the banking dynasties displaced the old aristocracy. The libraries and learned institutions of new Manchester devoted themselves to the discussion of science and technology, rather than religion and politics, celebrating the 'natural knowledge', that might be applied in this greatest of trading cities created by the industrial revolution. That might make money, more money for these self-made men!
The 'Manchester school of economics', Disraeli called it: the confidence in the free exchange of goods and labour, in economic individualism. 'From this filthy sewer, pure gold flows' … that was de Tocqueville, W. reads in his guidebook. And it was filthy. It was squalid, along the old Medlock where the casual workers lived: the car men and porters, the builders and decorators, the messengers and warehousemen. The old Medlock, where the Irish came to live.
W. reads from our notebook:
The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys…
That's Engels, of course. He brought Marx north on a visit in 1845. Was it in Manchester that the revolution would begin? Was it in the double rows of the back-to-backs that the secret of capitalism would reveal itself – the reality of capitalism, as it appeared in all its degradation to their inhabitants and as it hid itself as ideology in the middle classes who lived out in the suburbs? Was it here the grime and squalor of the low-lying alleys where cattles and pigs were slaughtered would be destroyed for the sake of what was not yet?
In Little Ireland, tucked into a river bend, Engels saw 'a horde of ragged women and children swarm about as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles'. He saw the cellars in which the Irish immigrants slept ten to a dark, damp room on beds of straw, scarcely above the level of the water flowing in the river. Tuberculosis spread through the overcrowded homes. Typhus and typhoid. Cholera, spread by standpipes fed by a river into which the midden privies and the cess pits drained.
Was it here it would begin, in this new kind of city, the looked-for turning of the world upside down? For a time, Manchester had been a radical town, a town of mass protests, we read in our guidebook. 'That all Governments, not immediately derived from and strictly accountable to the People, are usurpations and ought to be resisted and destroyed': that was the Declaration the reformers who gathered at St Peter's Field sent to the Prince Regent in 1819. They demanded universal suffrage. Annual elections. And that's where they were shot, the reformers, at St Peter's Field. That's where they were trampled to death in the panic the police started. The Peterloo Massacre.
After that, Manchester became a garrison town. And by Marx's visit, the politics of mass protest had ebbed away. Chartism withered. The workers sought reform rather than revolution. When mass unemployment came, there was no disorder. When famine came, no mass protest. The working classes joined the anti-immigrant, anti-Irish, anti-Catholic Tory party. And when the Jews arrived from the Eastern Europe of the pogroms, the workers railed against the 'Yids' and the 'sheeneymen' …
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