Chapter 9 - ‘Manchester Is, as It Were, the Heart of This Vast System’

Summary

9. The two ‘Northern Industrial Tours of the 1790s’ addressed by Jon Mee’s chapter are John Aikin’s A Description of the Country s/r round Manchester (1795) and William Turner’s ‘Northern Tour’ (1797), works which focus on northern England and bear witness to late-eighteenth-century innovations in textile manufacturing, and their wider ramifications. Aikin’s Description sometimes displays a sense of wonder in the face of the new world that it discovers, and it conjoins ideas of ‘improvement’ and social progress, albeit that as Mee demonstrates, it acknowledges the underside of economic growth too, by recognizing not only the connections between investment capital and the slave trade but also the negative environmental impact created by the harnessing of technological ingenuity. Turner more than Aikin addressed the social implications of improvement, highlighting the emergence of a new ‘commercial aristocracy’, although like Aikin, Mee argues, he at the same time questioned his and others’ ability to grasp and make sense of the rapidity and scale of change.