Hard Times (1854) by Charles Dickens

The characteristics of this city are: pollution, repetition, loss of identity of workers, the sense of alienation suffered by those who are forced to live in a place where all doing the same job where every day of the year is the same as any other day where all paths are identical as well as all buildings. This description presents a realistic picture, which derive their efficacy from the rhythmic repetition of simple statements with a subject and impersonal expressions contrasting highlight the negative aspects of the elements described.

The use of connectives: or, if so, enhances the contrast between negative and positive elements. And certainly at the level of sensory perception that humans enter the presence of the machine as an entity, as well as an array of practical modification of the environment: the experiences are visual, sound and smell to mark this new presence in terms of intrusion to construct a precise way of feeling, is intended to last, beyond different ideological positions.

The choice of terms that recall the senses and especially sight through the use of colour with a negative connotation (as black as death or negation of life; purple as something unnatural or as a sense of sadness as life red) contributes to make the realistic description is dissolved to make way for pure imagination. The imagination is the anticipation of a Dickensian cultural alienation and aesthetics that have extensive course in artistic production from the late '800. There are similes and metaphors through which the critique of the industrialization process becomes tight.

In short, everything is fake, unnatural, but it is the man to create and govern such "fiction." These metaphors urban mapping, therefore, the boundaries of a world "alien", some distressing, in which man moves with difficulty, but moves relatively protected.

Dickens prepares the reader for the introduction of the theme of alienation, expressed here by cause (the steam) and effect (melancholic madness), appearing as the frustration of workers and the loss of identity that distinguishes them. Before we run the whole melody sounded the keynote: Coketown. Was a town of red brick, or better, of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed.

There was a black channel and there was a river smelling purple for dyes that are poured, there were large clusters of buildings full of windows that rattled and shook all day in Coketown the pistons of steam rose and fell with regular and constant motion as the head of an elephant in the grip of melancholy madness. There were many wide roads, all identical to each other and we lived as equals among their people, coming and going all at the same time, doing the same patter on the pavement, to perform the same work, people for whom today was equal to yesterday and tomorrow, and every year was a replica of the past and those to come.

There was nothing in Coketown not themselves indicate a tireless industriousness. If the followers of a religious sect decided to erect a church - which had seven followers of eighteen - it jumped out of a pious warehouse of red brick, topped at times (but only in the finest copies), enclosed by a bell in a sort of cage birds. The only exception was the New Church, a building that plastered over the front door had a square bell tower topped with four pinnacles like sturdy wooden legs.

In cities all signs public buildings were in the exact same characters austere blacks and whites. The jail might have been the hospital, the hospital could have been the jail, the town hall could be either one or the other or both, or anything else, because nothing in the graceful lines of those buildings, was used to identify them.