Hard Times, Charles Dickens

Description of Coketown

Right from the title the narrator focuses the reader’s attention on the word “coke”. Such device lets the reader expect the text to be about industrialization or something linked with work. To tell the truth, the wordcoke stands for fuel. The introduction is created with the pretex of  two characters  Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind who are walking towards the town.

Going on reading you can immediately understand the text is the description of a town built up during the Industrial Revolution. Such expectation is also created by the word “town” in the title. It’s an imaginary town but it’s possible to identify it with Manchester.

Since the narrator is a third person narrator it comes out clearly that there will be a high density of narrator's filter in the text. In addition, the way the language is chosen helps the intelligent reader  recognise the narrator’s position about Coketown.

In the extract the reader  can distinguish the presence of many symbols that convey the idea of the real problems of the  place. 
The town is described in materialistic terms. It is depicted by different colours: the brick of "innatural red and black", "black canal", "the river that ran purple "and the atmosphere of pollution due to the tall chimneys and machinery that work continuously "for ever and ever" is easily perceptible.
The city appears monotonous not only in colour but also in sound,: the noise, the buildings  and the streets are described with the language of sense impression that make you see, hear and feel. 
The narrator conveys also his point of view about the inhabitants, focussing on the monotony and sadness of town life in an  industrialized setting where all that matters is strictlt connected with fact. 
People have lost their personality: they are equally like one another and look like robots. There is not even the idea of identity. 
Coketown was a bad city because of society too. All that mattered was the way you appeared. As a consequence “fancy” was totally removed exactly as it happens in Italy when at the moment there does not seem to be any hope but fear rather dominates people's expectations as Mr. L. Zingales has revealed in his analysis.

According to C. Dickens, during the Industrial Revolution, a city keywords were brick, smoke and ashes.

It seems as if the description were  rather contradictory , but this kind of antithesis was largely widespread in Victorian reality.
It is also interesting to notice the presence of words belonging to the semantic field of religion. The Church built in the centre of the town seemed to be the only building different from the others as if it could catch the attention of people. It follows that  religion was an important code in that period. The Protestant ethic affirmed that people who did not progress were damned.This might also explain why everything in Coketown is linked to work.

Let’s analyse the way Dickens conveys his point of view about industrialization.

By the use of metaphors, you can clearly recognize the presence of two kind of risks coexisting and causing not only serious physical dangers like pollution but even psychological problems.

The accumulation of adjectives suggests the narrator 's intention to describe the city. In addition,  the multifaceted nature of the city is suggested. A lot of adjectives are there to describe Coketown that turns out to be the icon of all industrialized cities.
The alienation due to the repetitive life in Coketown is significant and worrying message to alert readers about the existence of a psychological risk workers suffer from.