Analysis of the extract “Coketown” from Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times.

The text is an extract from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times written in 1854.
Charles Dickens lived in England during the 19th century, a period of rapid economic growth due to the industrial revolution. Industrial cities spread in England, sustained by their factories, which produced wealth and employed thousands of people, but their living and working conditions were extremely poor, they worked hours and hours and were underplayed.
During this period a philosophy by Jeremy Bentham called utilitarianism was widespread: it embraced the values of practicality and efficiency holding that everything you produce had to be useful for society. And according to Bentham something is useful when it produces happiness in society, when it grows pleasure and diminish pain. As a consequence the primary men’s objective became profit.
Dickens was disgusted by the single-minded pursuit of profit of his society and for this reason his novel Hard Times is a critique of industrialised society.

The extract is a descriptive text which describes life during the Industrial Revolution.
Reading the title (“Coketown”) the reader may rightly expect something related to a town in the period of the Industrial Revolution since coke hints at the typical fuel of that period.

In the first paragraph the narrator introduces the town with a metaphor: “Coketown was a triumph of fact”. This metaphor is important because underlines that what mattered in Coketown was the material aspect, while immaterial, as emotions and imagination were bandied (“it had no greater taint of fancy”). These lines hint at the capitalistic and utilitarian vision of people in the town and introduces the main point of Charles Dickens’ novel: the conflict between fact and fancy.
The question is: should an individual base his life on fact and rationality, or on imagination and fancy and so following his heart?
This struggle is got again in lines 33-34: "Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial".

The description of Coketown actually starts from the second paragraph. The industrial town appears 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”. The town is also tormented by an incessant noise due to the working of the pistons of steam-engine.
So Coketown itself embodies the decadence of industrialised economy.
A primary feature of Coketown's industrialised environment soon appears to be uniformity itself, another theme that is greatly reinforced by metaphorical language: “the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness”. Indeed the monotony of the noise produced by the piston 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.

With this description the narrator wants to hint that the process of mass producing standardised machines and people, typical of the industrialisation, is a fundamental force in Coketown's society which permeates the whole environment. Indeed the whole description constitute a very accusatory judgment on industrialism.
In summary, Dickens creates a greed-driven world where the principles of the market, led by the utilitarian principle, take precedence over human compassion. Although he condemns the proliferation of fact and rationality, as well as the oppression of imagination, he doesn’t offer a clear solution to society's ills, but on one note he is particular clear: human nature cannot be reduced to facts and figures or pure rationality based on scientific principles.