In the introductory line the name “Coketown” occurs for the first time. The narrator declares that name is the key-note of the speech he is going to deliver. It is important to reflect about the reference to the semantic field of music: it appears as an unconventional choice, useful to make the text more interesting for the reader. In other words, the image of the key-note, the A, striken by the narrator, creates a light dynamism, which involves the reader to go on reading.
Right from the start, the reader's attention focuses on the chromatic information provided in the expression "red brick". Then, the narrator underlines the unnatural hue of the colour, that is falsified by the presence of ashes. The black colour enters the scene and becomes a key-element. It is useful to reflect on the effect that the two colours have on the reader's mind: red is a hot colour, connected to passion and love, but also to blood; black gives the idea of something dirty and it can be associated even to something mysterious.
The atmosphere or the alternance created by the two colours is compared to the "painted face of a savage", providing an effect of untidiness and decreasing the rhythm of the narration.
Afterwards, the town is rendered through its chimneys, that never stop to throw their "interminable serpents of smoke", through its canal and its river, so polluted to appear black or purple and "ill-smelling", through its buildings and its streets. It is important to mark the importance of all the chromatic information given: the colour is here a vehicle to render the idea of pollution. Besides, it is important to focus on the expression "ill-smelling": here Dickens wants to underline the corruption of the lifestyle developed within the Industrial society, making a rather implicit comparison with an illness.
Zooming from a general view, the narrator moves to buildings. "Vast piles of buildings full of windows" populate the town: they are all offices and they host all the working life of Coketown. Actually, coming through this passage, the reader can feel a strong sense of dynamism connected to the working life of Coketown, rendered through onomatopaeic words as “rattling” and “trembling”, through a very high rhythm in narration and, lastly, through the methonimy of the steam-engine, which also recalls the most important innovation of the Industrial Revolution. The image of the “head of the elephant in a state of melancholy madness” exaggerates the fervour of the workers, making the portrait of Coketown become a parody.
The description of the streets, “all very like one another” is associated to the evenness of the human lives in Coketown: they all have the same timetables, they all have similar works. Everything and everyone in Coketown appears alienated. Everything and everyone in Coketown has absolutely nothing special.
Then, the narrator declares “You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful”: even chapels are all very like one another! As the narrator says, “The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else”. All in Coketown is just fact, fact and fact. There is nothing over utility.
The peak of irony is reached in the final word, “amen”, that the narrator uses to underline another time the unhopefulness of a model of town as the one of Coketown.