Coketown: analysis

“Hard Times” is one of most important novel (by Charles Dickens) about industrialization. In the chapter number 5, the author described coketown, which isn’t a real city, but it results very similar to English industrialized town.

To analyse this extract we should start from its title that is “Coketown”: coke means carbon, one of the most important resources during the Industrial Revolution, so, only focusing on the title, the intelligent reader can understand something of the contest of the story.

The description of this city is almost paradoxical, indeed, Dickens to describe the town used sad colours: for example, canals are black and rivers are purple, it seems unnatural.

Moreover, we can say that atmosphere is banal, because machines rule over Coketown, with their monotonous operating; the landscape is linear as the reader can understand from streets and people which are all the same.

At the beginning of the text there is a relevant particular, that is, the author used very much the irony, for instance, in the first paragraph, where he defined the town as a triumph of fact.

The principal example that underlines this town's situation is religion: it should be the most important aspect of a person's life (at least, in the period of Charles Dickens), and now it is reduced. Churches become as miserable and naked as prisons, that are the same of schools and of hospitals. This reminds the reader to Utilitarism and Puritanism, two of the ways of thought presented in England and which promoted the progress.

Also the language that Dickens used is important to discuss because he represented the topic of the description with exaggeration; furthermore we can say that the language is repetitive to represent the same condition of the town. The repetition of the word "fact" at the end of the text is significant.

The final phrase, that ends with the word "Amen", reinforces all these ideas. This can be seen in a sarcastic way.