Coketown, an extract from Hard Times by C. Dickens, is a fictional industrial town, typical of the North.

The title suggests the word coal, essential material for the factories and the production of which the city is based.

The narrator is omniscient and intrusive, in fact he uses a hypothetical sentence for expressing his own opinion, but in the sentences he uses an impersonal subject that highlights the alienation of people living in Coketown, alienation (and monotony) focused through the constant repetition of words (facts facts facts). Dickens also uses irony ("bell in a birdcage") and the grotesque ("florid wooden legs") to describe the "New Church" so he makes the reader understand his negative judgment about a decadent city based only on the property and built according to canons of Utilitarianism (the same streets, same buildings, even people alike). Therefore the school could be a prison, the prison hospital, the hospital a shed ...
In addition, Dickes focuses on the reader's senses, especially sight: all colors tend to be red and black to convey the idea of violence and suffering. The city is then an unnatural place in which it is not even reported the presence of a human being, and it is therefore even artificial.