Coketown is an extract from the fifth chapter of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times.

Coketown, the title, refers to an unreal city: it is the archetype of North England Industrialized city. Furthermore Coketown means the city of coke, that it comes from burning coal.

In this extract Mr. Dickens describes the city mixing information and negative comments. So the intelligent reader can understand the novelist wants to criticize this city, and all the system they represent.

The first paragraph is a picture of the city, but the writer highlights some aspects. For example, the city is made up of bricks “that would have been red”: all buildings are equal and pollution had blacked out them. Pollution is a central theme of the paragraph and it is conveyed by metaphors, like the “interminable serpents of smoke” or “the black canal”. Factories, that they are artificial, during the Second Industrial Revolution had determined an unbearable pollution level. So, artificial things does not necessarily produce health: another key issue is the predominance of artificial things than natural ones. 

In the second part of the paragraph it is conveyed the monotony of Coketown, where all streets are the same, all people are equal and do the same things as the others; every day is like the previous or the next one. The intelligent reader can understand Mr. Dickens’ criticism of alienation that rages in the industrial society.

The second paragraph deals with the contrast between Coketown’s workers (“the work by which was sustained”) and the high class(“comforts of life” that only riches could have).

The third paragraph continues the description of the city.

Coketown is based on the principle of utility. Also religious buildings are made up of red bricks, and they seems to be “warehouse” and not churches. The repetition of “fact” at lines 38-39 alludes to materialism that dominates Victorian mentality.

The narrator adopts a particular use of the langue that involves all five senses. There also metaphors and symbols that conveys Mr.Dickens’ position about his contemporary society.