Exercises from pages 291-293 – Coketown

• What kind of town is Coketown? What it contained?
Coketown is an industrial town, as suggested by its name which refers to the main fuel used during the Industrial Revolution, polluted by smoke and ashes coming from countless machinery and chimneys and covering everything, hiding colours under a grey/black cover. As the air even water is unhealthy: in the only existing canal doesn't flow fresh water but black and the river “ran purple with ill-smelling dye”. Coketown is also tormented by an incessant noise due to the working of the piston of steam-engine. This monotony reflects in streets and building which are “all very like one another” and also in people who do the same work, everyday in the same hours, in a system which pursuits human alienation.

• Are there any differences between public buildings in Coketown?
- There are no differences between any public building as disclosed in the following quotation: “ The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else”.

• What did a native organisation of Coketown want to do?
- A native organisation wanted to make people in Coketown religious by main force through acts of Parliament.
• What did the Teetotal Society show in tabular statements?
- The Teetotal Society showed in tabular statements that people would and did get drunk and proved that nothing would stop them.
• How did the chemist and druggist show that the inhabitants of Coketown took opium?
- As Teetotal Society did, even chemist and druggist showed through tabular statements that if the inhabitants of Coketown didn't get drunk, they took opium.
• What was the aim of the jail chaplain?
- The aim of the jail chaplain is to show the same people would resort to hidden low haunts where they could find low singing and dancing and joining them.
• What did Mr Gradgrind and Mr Bounderby want to prove?
- They want to prove, on the base of their own experience, that the same people were restless, never thankful gentlemen who never knew what they wanted, eternally dissatisfied and unmanageable.

• Define the type of narrator:
- The narration is in third person and the narrator is omniscient and intrusive. Dickens uses the technique of telling and all the reader knows is influenced by the narrator so the reader cannot make his/her own idea on the story. Dickens’s omniscient narrator also assumes the role of a moral guide, and his opinion tends to shape our own interpretations of the story. 

• What is the keyword of the passage?
- “Fact”, that is frequent object of repetition, is the keyword of the extract.

• Images used by Dickens to describe Coketown:
1. Similes: “a town of an unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage”; “the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness”;
2. Metaphors: “a town of machinery and chimneys”; “serpents of smoke”.

• Is the process of Industrialisation approved or not?
- The process of Industrialisation is strongly criticised by Dickens.

• What aspects of the inhabitants of Coketown do the mechanical repetition of words underline?
- Dickens uses the mechanical repetition of words to underline the monotony of life in Coketown and to denounce people’s alienation.