Coketown is an extract taken from C. Dickens' Hard Times. It is about a typical Victorian city that is an industrial, monotonous, artificial and material one.

The material aspect is already pointed out from C. Dickens' choice about the theme: he focused his attention on buildings and on the way the city looks like, without giving space to its inhabitants.
But also the use of the language and the narrative technique add meaning to it. Right from the start you can find an example: the extract opens saying that Coketown "was a town of red brick": the verb "was" shows the city as if it were entirely and only made of brick.

The city is described as "a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever" (the serpent is not by chance the symbol of the tempter). It contained several large streets and small ones all very like to one another. Even people, who lived there, are all like one another and they go in and out at the same hours, "with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next". In these lines it is possible to find the unique reference to human being, who is described as a mass of people without soul, alienated and dominated by monotony and by the wild rhythm that industrial life implies. The monotony is also mirrored in the aspect of the city and it is underlined by the repetition of the word "like one another" and "same".

In addition the writer appealed to sense impression in order to give the idea of an artificial and industrial city: buildings are no more red, but they are almost black because of the smoke and ashes of factories, the canal (artificial) is black and the river run purple with ill-smelling dye. What's more everyday there is a short and sharp sound and a trembling all day long because of the piston that goes up and down (ironically compared to an elephant, who shakes his head in a state of rapture).
The second part of the extract focuses more the attention on public buildings, which house institutions, especially the church. As everything in Coketown, the church (not accidently called "warehouse") has a function: sometimes it has a bell in a birdcage on the top of it.

Besides, the monotony of the city is pointed out again: the architecture of public buildings is always the same: " The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction."

In the last part of the extract C. Dickens clearly reveals materialism, which afflict the city and its inhabitants: he writes that everything in Coketown is fact and the idea is highlighted by the repetition of this last word. Even school, design, relations between master and man are all fact. So in Coketown there is no place for imagination, for something that couldn't be useful or for something irrational because "what you couldn't state in figures [...] was not and never should be".

Therefore, after having considered these aspects, it is possible to say that the description of the city contributes to give an idea of Victorian culture and people's thought, which was based on the theory of Utilitarianism, the system of thought which states that the best action or decision in a particular situation is the one which brings most advantages to the most people.