The extract provides the description of Coketown, an industrialized town in the North of England. The name reveals the importance of coal, the fuel of industrial machines.

The third person omniscient intrusive narrator doesn't provide an objective portray of the town, but he connotes it and filters details (resorting to metaphors, similes, sound effects...) in order to create a negative overall effect.
The first image is built with the language of sense impression: the reader can perceive the town both with sight and with smell; the dominant colors, red and black, remind of negative ideas (violence, death, fire, blood, darkness): in particular the dark atmosphere seems like a threat.

The simile (like the painted face of a savage) emphasized the chromatic violence and the unnatural, chaotic aspect of the town. In addition considering the simile the reader understands the negative way in which savages were considered in the Victorian Age.

The narrator puts the focus on the industrial features synthesized in the metonymy machinery, tall chimneys: they appear as if they dominated the scene, an artificial element that spreads in nature in an antithetical relationship with it. The narrator wants to underline pollution and harmful effects of industries not only over nature but also over human beings: the reader feels threatened by those buildings like by monsters. Also the metaphor (serpents of smoke) contributes to this narrative effect: there is no way to stop the process, to escape industrialization, past can't be retrieved because also present can't be fixed and everything progresses in an interminable way.
The idea of pollution is conveyed by the colors (black-purple) of the water in proximity; the adjective ill-smelling refers not only to nature degradation, but also to illness or death, that are human issues: it acquires a symbolic meaning and refers to bad-employment , bad sanitary conditions and spiritual poverty of the middle class, completely interested in materiality.

The description goes on revealing de-individualization of individuals: the city has got no identities and everything is repetitive: the anaphoric structure and pleonastic devices, the repetition of the same words (like, same, every) and climax (very, still, more) underline it. Technological progress is not accompanied by a human enticement: on the contrary everything is obsessive and suffocating.

The narrator wants to denounce contradictions in society in particular workers' poverty. Therefore he compares Coketown to comforts enjoyed by the Middle class.

The final sentence recall the absence of peculiarities or identities in the town: people feels alienated.