The theme of this reading is to describe the conditions of the part of the town of Manchester where the working class people lived. Engels takes plenty of opportunities to describe just how filthy and disgusting this part of town was. He says that this area defies "all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health."
The sentence, "This arises chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious tacit agreement, as well as with unspoken conscious determination, the workingpeople's quarters are sharply seperated from the sections of the city reserved for the middle class;..." stood out to me because it shows that the different social classes were intentionally kept separate. Part of the reason why this caught my attention is because I do not agree with that in the way that the people of Manchester were divided into groups based soley on how much money they had. This is especially true since the working class citizens' living quarters were in such bad condition.
This generated the idea that people instinctively group others together based on their social status. This was very prevelant in this reading due to the fact that Engels focused so heavily on the poor conditions in the working class sector and how well it was disconnected from the middle class sector. To me, this demonstrated how much people tend to rely on economic factors to determine a person's worth.
A modern parrallel that I saw to this reading is the modern social system in the United States. I saw this because the class differences have become much more noticable in the past few years due to the economic recession. Today's economic class difference is not quite as noticable as it was in Manchester, but it is getting to where a person can normally tell if a person is from a middle class family just by merely seeing them.
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