The text is an extract taken from Dickens' novel, Hard Times published in 1854.

At the denotative level the text is a description of an industrial town, called Coketown.

The narrator describes the town, describes colours, workhouses, streets and, at the end of the extract describes the Church.

The narrator is a 3^rd person omniscient intrusive narrator and I can understand this by the use of  phrases such as "let us strike", the use of the second plural person makes understand the reader is not free to make his personal judgments but it is guided by the narrator.

At the connotative level the description of this city recalls the idea of an anonymous place where the identities are lost, as a matter of fact the narrator uses anaphora and repetitions to convey the idea of a monotonous city for example "for ever and ever", " every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow" and the obsessive use of the world same achieved this effect: "same hours, same sounds, same work" amplify the sense of lost.

Also the colours are suitable to convey the idea of an artificial town (the narrator says "it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage") ; red recalls blood, fire, passion while black recalls death, hell, darkness and sin; also the description of the red bricks is suitable to convey the idea of another colour: the grey ("it was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it"), gray is a colour that recalls pollution of course but also homologation and a place where everything is the same, there is no sun, no colours, is like a savage town made up of robots, a town without culture.

The name of the town is important, Coketown means town of coke, the main fuel used during the industrial revolution.

But in a part of the text the description is cantered on a Church, the period of industrial revolution is supported by a faith in God, the Puritanism is the principal religion and affirms that only who is able to climb the social ladder will be saved in Heaven while who falling down is damned.

The text, even if it played on the exaggeration of the tones, make the reader understand the implicit criticism about the life-style of that town and always in a implicit way makes the reader understand  the main features of the Victorian Age.