The present text will discuss the quatation according to which C. Dickens's Hardtime, the novel of Coketown and Mr Bounderby transforms Utilitarianism into a funny reading experience.

Utilitarianism is the philosophy in the backgroung of the novel and finds its best representative in Mr Bounderby, one of the main characters of the narrative and one who finds Coketown, the setting of Industrialization unbearable.

According to the Utilitarian principle whatever was the to be produced should be useful and even time had to be invested well. Jeremy Bentham was the father of Utilitarianism and throught that whatever was useful should contribute to happiness and consequently reduce pain. Such vision has become the doctrine Mr Bounderby and at the same time it has shaped Coketown.

Even if Mr Bounderby is the icon of the self-made man and has managed to improve his social conditions according to the Protestant ethic, the reader finds him ridiculous and pathetic. All of this is due to an intelligent use of the language on the part of third person omniscent intrusive narrator who makes of what was considered a good example a really grotesque character and to tell the truh Mr Bounderby's resemblance of a pupper figure is the result of a hyperbolical use of the cathegories of characterisation made. The choise makes the reader only pantly to identify the character with somebody realistic and exicting in the real world. It follows that therefore the result is a pathetic figure that can only provoke laughter and last but not least a sense of pity. If the reader goes deeper into the text he or she will recognise a series of fictional devices that contribute to make the character only the aspect of parody. To start with his same surname the character sound the celebration of all the features connected to the Puritan mentality: 'he is a banker, a merchant and a manifachter and what not'. Moreover his patronizing attitued towards Mrs Grandgrind not only displays the subject position of the pour female character who sound afraid of his man who iis represented 'the bolly of humility' he also allows the reader to understand the role of women in a totally man-cented social system. More that a social and economic improvement in the social ladder, C. Dickens's Mr Bounderby seems to have undergone a social resurection that has transformed a pour thing into a tycoun.

He who 'was born in a ditch' as now succeded to become somebody who has a 'commanding position' in a place like Coketown that is the fictional representation of the typical Industrilized town of the Victorian age. Even here, the narrator seems to conjure up the image of a Dante's Inferno in order to convey the idea of a totally alienating town the icon of which is coked. Again the choice of a name becomes symbolical as well as ridicoulus to allow the reader to create his mental image of the novel's setting. This is the effect of an intelligent use of language that ranges from the use of language of sense impression ('it was a town of red brick') to the anaphoric structure of the description that contributes to the same monotony it wants to elicite in the reader.

Metaphors and figure of speech togheter eith the frequence sound effect 'like one toanother' give the ideaand picture of a town characterised by noise and pollution and desease also because in such a town workers could only drink to bear the alienation of a life that seemed to have no sense.

Both descriptions and characterisations return an idea as well as an image of a plays of people that seems very distant from reality and the reader has the impression to be infront of a comic sence that mix her/him laugh but at the same time provokes a sence pity for everybody who is compelled to live there.