HARD TIMES - CHARLES DICKENS - ANALYSIS

I had read a text taken from the novel "Hard Times" (1854) by Charles Dickens.  It is about a fictional town, called Coketown.  Right from the beginning we understand the writer wants to involve readers, using the pronoun "us". Then he starts to describe the town, a town of red bricks, if the industries' smokes and ashes had allowed to see its natural colour red. But they covered the red, transforming it in an unnatural colour. A red that you cannot find in Nature, modified by someone (in this case by the grey of smokes and ashes). The town is also black, because of the pollution of smokes and ashes. The writer makes a comparison between the town, "painted" of unnatural red and black, and the painted face of a savage, underling the infernal features of the town. It is as a savage: it is hostile, not habitable. It has the colour of passions and suffering. It is an infernal town. It was an industrializated town, with factories and industries, out of their chimneys smokes and ashes come out continuously, like snakes that never lost their twisted shape. The simile let readers get an idea of how the city could be. Dickens' persistence on the perpetual condition of the town. It would not itschange. The smokes will keep on to be wasted in the air "forever and ever"à "and never got uncoiled". The town's faith is already estabilished.

In the town there is a purple river, its colour is ill and smell. Dickens uses a metaphoric language to underline the corrupted state in which the town is. The description continues and the writer tells us about the monotony of the town. The piston of the steam- engine makes always the same movement, as an elephant's head in state of melancholy madness. Dickens judges the town negatively, using the adverb "monotonously". He keeps on emphatize the town's monotony : the town is composed of streets similar to others, habited by people of other places, that do the same thing in the same time, upon the same pavement, and they do the same work every day. Every day is as another one. All the day will be as the last ones. In the town there is no creativity, all is flact, stationary, nothing new happens. Events are all the same ones. Dickens highlights the impossibility to live in the town, it is an ossession to live in Coketown.  People do not have a personal identity, they are as the others, normal, even ordinary. The town does not offer comfortsà "we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned".

In Coketown everything was horrible, and what was not so, has been made by voluntary. All you can see in Coketown is something that works, useful to work. Even the churces were made of red bricks; they were not so different from others building (monotony in architecture). There is an exception, the only one: the New Church, "a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs".