Coketown is an extract taken from Hard Times, written by Charles Dickens.

In this extract there is a description of the city, the symbol of Industrial revolution. The signs of pollution are described with some imagines related to religion, for example the smoke of industrial chimneys seemed serpent, the figure of sin, present in the scene with Adam and Eva.

In this town people weren’t free, they seemed to be in a cage. They had a monotonous life that appeared to mark by the rhythm of the piston of steam engine. The city embodied the persons.

The description of institutional buildings produced a sense of suffocation, there wasn’t space for relax but everything could be useful. In this city wasn’t allow the imagination and as a consequence of the setting in which people lived there were civilization or culture.

People in that town seemed to have a secondary position because they were a product of industrialization.

Dickens presented the city like the hell, nothing of human and there wasn’t way to escape, no future; for this reason the writer described an unnatural reality.