Hard Times is a novel written by Charles Dickens in 1854.

I' m going to analyse an extract of Hard Times, talking about Coketown.

The firs impression of this extract is a negative impression due to the result of details and connotative choices; Coketown gives the idea of no escape.

There is a third person, omniscient, intrusive narrator: he steps into the text and he speaks with the reader.

The reader gives an indirect criticism: he uses adverbs to give his judgments.

The novel is set in Coketown, in North England, were people can find the mines from which extract coal.

The world "solitary" suggests the idea that Coketown was built in a place distant to other building.

 "Coketown"  is a fictional name of a town; coke stand for coal, the typical fuel during the Victorian Age.

This choice reflects the difficult situation of the Victorian Age: there were born a lot of factories; their objective was win the competition, so some of them made progress, some else went bankrupt: unemployment and women' s and children' s bad word conditions were typically of the Victorian Age.

So, in this text, Dickens describes people conditions.

There is an onomatopoeic sound of verbs that create a monotonous and enervating sense of suffocation and there is a frequent use of anaphora and alliteration that hearing the idea of obsessive repetition and boring monotony:

"...the SAME hours, the SAME sound upon the SAME pavements, to do the SAME work, and whom every day was the SAME as yesterday and tomorrow, and EVERY year the counterpart of the last and the next".

This repetition of the world "same" gives the idea of no escape, no hope, no change, the idea of suffocation, of prison, of no intimacy: people have lost their identity and they seem to move like robots (v. T. S. Eliot - The Waste Land).

Started from the start, there are two different colours: red and black.