MB UNIUD

Now I am going to analyze an extract from Hard Times by Charles Dickens. I am going to analyze the first part of chapter three, The Key-Note. There is a III person omniscient narrator.

The chapter talks about Coketown, a manufacturing centre. Coketown is full of smoke and ashes, machinery and chimneys, it has a black canal and a river with "ill-smelling dye", it has many large and small streets all like one another, people make always the same things and there is only one church, New Church. Dickens makes a comparison between the "unnatural red and black" of the city and "the painted face of a savage", this means that Coketown is an uncivilized and unnatural city, as a matter of fact savages are uncivilized. But the comparison with something natural, like savages, isn't the only one we fin in the text. As a matter of fact we find a comparison between the smoke of the chimneys and serpents and the monotonous work of the steam-engine with the head of an elephant. Probably Dickens used nature in order to underline how uncivilized Coketown was.

The text says that everything is the same: the streets, people and their work. This brings to the loss of identity, people are like robots. There is only one Church, and if someone would have tried to build a new chapel it would have no sense, nobody would go in there, as a matter of fact religion isn't useful if you don't even know who you are. There isn't time to go to church, industry doesn't stop.

In conclusion the text talks about the loss of identity and the repetitiveness that industry brings.