Coketown

Page 293

Exercise 3

Coketown was a city in which there was no space for fantasy, but only for facts, and they were at the same time the cause and the purpose of the city.

The smoke and ashes determined the color of Coketown and made it dark black even the bricks, which should have been red, of the cubes which included all commercial activity and not. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys out of which smoke got constantly out. And then here were a black channel and a river flushed from smelly dyes, and from a vast piles of blocks full of windows, that acted as buildings, one could hear all day long shaky rattling of the piston of the steam-engine that went up and down monotonously. Here is the second crucial aspect of Coketown: the monotony. The city was planned with wide and narrow streets, all identical and populated by equal people who followed the same hours and produced the same noise, who all got the same job and lived every day of every year such as the previous and the future ones.

Exercise 4

• Until then, eighteen religious persuasions have erected churches that were not really anything different from all the others piles of blocks, except for some rare specimens that were topped by a bell enclosed in a "bird-cage."

• The only exception was the New Church: a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short like florid wooden legs.

• The inscriptions were all painted in severe black and white characters.

• Ironically, the author speaks about the "graces" of the buildings, which were so poor and motonotone that make all the buildings, the hospital, the town hall, the prison, identical in the eyes of the observators.

• Every building was a nineteenth-century materialism expression: there were only facts, even in the more spiritual aspects.

• There were the M'Choakumchild school and the drawing school, and both were just made by facts.

• The narrator concludes this section with a religious reference ("Amen") to highlight the lack of religion and spirituality in all that was only produced for a final gain in the name of numbers and calculations.

Exercise 5

1. There was an organization founded right in Coketown, whose members, at every session of the House of Commons, demanded indignantly an act of Parliament that forced the workers to be religious.

2. The Teetotal Society complained that the people quoted above would get drunk, showed in tabular statements that they did get drunk, and proved at tea parties that no inducement, human or Divine (except a medal), would induce them to forego their custom of getting drunk.

3. They showed that the inhabitants of Coketown took opium with other tabular statements.

4. The jail chaplain showed that the same people would resort to low haunts hidden from the public eye, where they heard low singing and saw low dancing, and mayhap joined in it.

5. Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby wanted to show that these people were nothing good; that whatever you did for them, they were never happy or grateful for it, they were restless, they did not know what they wanted, that they lived upon the best, and bought fresh butter, and insisted on Mocha coffee, and rejected all but prime parts of meat, and yet were eternally dissatisfied and unmanageable.

Exercise 6

There is a third person omniscient intrusive narrator.

Exercise 7

According to my opinion, the keyword of the extract is “fact”. Indeed everything in Coketown turns around “fact, fact, fact”. After all the facts characterized the materialism typical of the utilitarian philosophy that had the only purpose the one of production of profits and gains and left no space for imagination.

Exercise 8

SIMILES:

• Like the painted face of a savage;

• Like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness;

• Like gold that had stood the fire.

   

  METAPHORS:

• Pious warehouses of red brick.

What do they have in common? Is the process of industrialization approved of or criticised?

Both the similes and the metaphor emphasize the dark and negative aspects of industrialization of which Dickens demonstrates himself as a critical.

Exercise 9

1. “Red” at lines 4-5;

2. “Brick” at line 4;

3. “Like one another” at lines 13-14-15;

4. “Same” at lines 15-16-17;

5. “Infirmary” at line 31;

6. “Jail” at lines 31-32;

7. “Fact” at lines 1,33,35,36,40;

8. “Tabular statements” at lines 53,55,57,58,70;

9. “Gentlemen” at lines 68,72,73,74.

• MONOTONY: Monotony is, from the beginning of the text, part of the character of the inhabitants of Coketown and Charles Dickens emphasizes it using the example of Mr. Gradgrind's wife, who lacking in imagination. All the residents in the city do the same job, follow the same times, and live every day exactly as the previous and the text one;

• AMUSEMENT: It takes no part in the town development;

• ALIENATION: The workers, who have become alienated from the fruits of their production, walk through the streets on Sunday morning, ignoring the ringing of bells, and everything that happens around them because they have become part of the assembly line too (Taylorism) and they behave like automatons.

• CREATIVITY: It had no space in the town.

Exercise 10

The fifth chapter of the first book of the novel “Hard Times” is dated 1854 so it obviusly contains Victorian issues such as industrialisation and utilitarism (that was the philosophy that developed during those years) both based on the production of utility and profits. Coketown, and this can be understood from the name of the town, is an industrial city that, like many others, was built in the nineteenth century, and in it Dickens outlines all the dark and negative aspects of industrialization and shows us what were the effects it had on the lives of the inhabitants of the industrialized cities. In the town daughter of industrialization there was no space for fancy, only for facts, for chimneys, dirt, pollution and brick blocks in which the machines never ceased to work.