CHARLES DICKENS, Hard Times  (1854), Chapter V

Analysis

This extra is a description of a town that essentially would have been red but is grey. This town is characterized by the grey smoke of the factories and their chimneys and everything is similar and repetitive. The plot is isn’t so articulated, but Dickens’ use of the language makes the reader in contact with the Victorian Age’s reality.

The two colors are both negative:  grey is the Industrial Revolution’s one, that is the characterization of the technical progress but of the humankinds regression. And  red is linked to blood, so to suffering and pain.  In particular Dickens underlines the Industrial Revolution’s consequences with particulars narrative techniques, that is grotesque, repetitions, metonymies,  juxtapositions of sensations and personified nature. How are these techniques linked together? Going in depth, the metonymies creates in the reader mind the physical idea of the Victorian reality: factories and churches. But, their connotative aspect explain the Industrialization and the Religion themselves. The repetitions stress their negative exaggeration, that produces the grotesque.  This emphasis is supported by juxtapositions of sensations and personified nature.

Indeed, there are “serpents of smoke” and the engine works like and elephant. Then everything is repeated in every way. For instance, “forever and ever” is followed by “and never”, then there are eight “like” and nine “same” and all culminates in “every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next”. So the reader has the idea of a static reality.

All these points put together, makes the Victorian reality appear as alienating with no place for individuality and opinions. And I think this comes out in Dickens’ choice of using the noun “leg”, that is a banned word because reminds to sex. It’s as if he wanted no doubts in his work.

In conclusion, also in this text appears the Victorian attitude to Utilitarianism and Puritanism: to own as much goods as possible in order to not fall down the social ladder and to receive God’s blessing.