The extract is taken form the novel Hard Times  by Charles Dickes. The use of narrative techniques is very important: the narrator is the third person omniscient and intrusive narrator that uses a lot of metaphors and appeals often to senses, especially on sight, hearing and smelling. The name of the city "Coketown" remind suddenly to the Industrial Revolution and the fuel employed in factories for the producing process. The first images of the town recalls its pollution and alienation where the material is most important the human side, and where natural and artificial are in conflict. In the conflict, artificial took place of natural, and the writer underlines this using the colors: red is became unnatural red, black is painted black, there are not channels but canals. In this way the narrator underlines the pollution in the city as the effect of industry and its machinery but also in the same time he criticizes them defining the town savage, that means uncultural, unhealthy. Colors mostly used are read and black that in Puritan mentality represents blood, sin, damnation. Another important religious images is the serpent used for describing the smoke of factories, and it represents tempter. The expression "forever and ever, and never got uncoiled" underlines the eternity of this process that will never stop, so there is no hope for better life. The industrial society is criticized from inside using allusive language. The pistons of the machinery are compared to the mad elephant so the machine is mad but also its products and consequences are mad too. The narrator appeals also tho the smell "ill-smelling dye" and to the hearing using onomatopeical sounds "a rattling and a trembling". The narrator described the nature form the general to the specific for making environment, and every thing described is anthropomorphized, that means everything is given the form of person. Another important theme in this section is monotony, the consequence of impossibility of any change. Is is created by intense use of anaphoric repetitions, by description of the town where the all is equal, people, actions, building and the place does not seem made for the people but for animals. There is eternal repetition of actions, there is no hope for changing. 

The second sequence opens with idea of work, very important theme of Victorian society according to Puritanism and Utilitarianism. The town seems to be inseparable from work because sustained by it. The idea of suffocating and impossible life present in the first sequence is taken to the extreme using exaggeration when the narrator says that ladies could not even hear for the town. The narrator continues with another characteristics of the town that are voluntary: everything was full of work and this highlights its importance. Also religious buildings were similar to a warehouse where the goods were stored. There were the New Church as exception because it was stuccoed while the other buildings were of red bricks. This idea highlights monotony in the buildings because even the inscriptions where the same so every building could be any other.

Afterwards, the writer underlines the importance of fact (it is repeated 11 times in five lines), typical idea of Utilitarianism where everything were facts, both material and immaterial. This is the typical mentality of Industrial Revolution society when all were reduced to the numbers, calculations and sail. The extract concludes with words "world without end, Amen" that ironically underline the hopeless and impossibility of changes.