Coketown Analysis

From this
extract it is possible to understand the opinion of Dickens about the cities
and the society of his time. The city of Coketown is the symbol of all the new
industrial cities, dirty, polluted, unhealthy, everyone resembling each other.
The name of the city itself is important, it makes the reader understand that
the principal element is coal, which characterises and sustains it. In the
second paragraph the authors points out that everything in the city has to be "workful":
this means that only the work and the profit are important. The use of irony in
this description lets the reader understand the negative opinion of the author.
He criticises also the Utilitarian theory according to which imagination is
abolished and only facts and material aspects were important. He does so with
the repetition of the word "fact". He recalls also the senses using images
(like the steam engine compared to an elephant), verbs and colours (black,
white, red, purple), which give the reader the vivid idea of  that city. In the description there is no
human presence, except for a short passage where people are described as being
all the same, everyone behaving the same way and doing the same repetitive
actions.