Coketown analysis

In the extract Coketown the reader gets an impression and an image on the industrial city. Dickens uses allegories to point out in a satiric way how coketown is a hell-like place, where everything is dark with no hope.

Even the name coketown itself shows that this town's focus is factories and industrialization and thus the corresponding poverty of the lower classes. It is a dull and dirty place with polluted air and water, where people are lifeless because their days are repetitive and monotones. These descriptions evoked a negative feelings and a bad atmosphere into the reader's mind.

The town presents itself in red and black. The red color comes from the red bricks most of the houses are built of. Dickens also uses color symbolisms to describe Coketown. He associates colors to vitality and individualism and relates the colors of black and white with the loss of vitality and individuality. He therefore uses the color black or white not only to describe the environmental damage brought about by industrialism, but also the loss of people's individual freedom, joy and liveliness in their town.
Coketown is always covered by clouds of smoke, an image that conveys the murky, polluted nature of this industrialized town. The phrase Dickens uses is "serpents of smoke," a sinister image that conveys the idea that something evil hovers over Coketown. Dickens uses another sinister image to describe the pistons of the steam engines; they constantly go up and down "like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness". This unusual image suggests awesome amounts of energy and strength trapped in meaningless repetitive activity-which rather sums up the life of the factory.
Coketown's principle technique is telling and showing, Dickens describes the city how it is, he also uses exaggerations, but the reader can accept this vision or refuse it. 

The eternal repetition, monotonous and suffocation of life is created by the anaphoric use of language. There is no option of change.