HARD TIMES

Coketown

"Hard Times" is a novel written in the middle of XIX century by Charles Dickens. Thus it was written when Industrial Revolution was in full flood and British society was changing.

In the extract we are taking in consideration the writer describes this change focusing in describing a town. The town described is Coketown, a fictional industrial town in the British country. Its name recalls to coke, which is a particular kind of coal, the main fuel of machineries of that time.

The writer wants to describe critically the new situation. To reach his aim, Dickens uses a third person omniscient and intrusive narrator in this description, exploiting the musical tone and repeating some words more and more times, thus creating in the reader a sense of monotony where everything is plain, always the same. Moreover the writer uses a semantic level that makes everything seem uglier and unnatural.