Dickens' Coketown

The extract is taken from Dickens' "Hard Times". It contains the description of an industrial city of the Victorian Age: Coketown.

Coketown is the classic city that reflects the period of the Industrial Revolution: it’s an imaginery town but it’s possible to locate Preston-city, near Manchester.

In the extract the reader can distingiush the presence of many symbols that give us the idea of the existing problems inside this particular place.
The town is depicted by different colours: the brick of "innatural red and black", "black canal", "the river that ran purple "and it’s evident the atmosphere of pollution due to the tall chimneys and machinery that work continuously "for ever and ever".
The city appears monotonous not only in the colours but also in the sounds, in the noises, in the buildings ,in the streets.
What’s about its inhabitants? As in a painting, the inhabitants’ expression communicate only the monotony and sadness of life in this industrialized town.
People have lost their personality, their individuality: they are equally like one another and look like robots.

By the use of metephors, we can clearly deduce the presence of two types of risk that coexist and cause not only serious physical dangers (pollution) but even psychological problems.
The alienation due to the repetitive life in Coketown is a significative and worrying message of the existence of a psycological risk that workers may suffer.