Arianna Thielman

7 December 2020

Literature in English

Professor MacLure

Manchester

            The novel Mary Barton was based in Manchester and mentioned many times the different aspects of the city. Manchester is in northwestern England and is a metropolitan area/city. It is an important “regional city” and was considered an urban prototype in the early 18th century. It was one of the first industrial cities created in the now Western World (Rodgers, 1). It began as being a market town that produced mainly cotton and only had a population of a mere 10,000 people. Soon those industries had prospered, and it soon became a commercial and industrialized city with over 300,000 inhabitants. Eventually the 19th century turned into Manchester's “golden age” and it was all thanks to the cotton industry that began in Manchester and spilled out into the suburbs and urban areas that surrounded the area/city. Mining was also a very common occurrence in Manchester as it has coal measures under the plain like geography that the city has. Manchester also had a few rivers that the city was set on the bank of. This river is River Irwell. The city itself is 45 square miles. The climate of Manchester is considered to be, “mild, moist, and misty” (Rodgers). The winters are mild, and the summers barely reach 50 degrees Fahrenheit. There is an annual rainfall of 32 inches but is not considered to be notably high by what other areas in western Britain experiences. Manchester's architecture was designed like Greek architecture, using steel-framed structures and outdoor city centers setup, and was intended to outshine the architecture in London. One fun fact of the city is that there were many libraries, around 25 separate branches to choose from!

Resources

“Administration and Social Conditions.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/place/Manchester-England/Administration-and-social-co...