Charles Dickens - Hard Times - Chapter 5

The text considered is the 5^th chapter of the novel Hard Times written by Charles Dickens and published in 1854. The novel has the function to underline the economic and social problems of the time.

At the beginning of the chapter there is the word COKETOWN, written in capital letters, that is the name of the imaginary town where Dickens set the novel. The word conveys the idea of the process of industrialization, indeed coke is a kind of fuel and fuel was very important during the Industrial Revolution because steam engines, which were applied to locomotives and steamboats, needed it. So, speaking about the Industrial Revolution, an intelligent reader can understand that the town is probably Manchester, where all people went around 1780s in search of work because it had a lot of mines and factories.

Besides, in the first paragraph, Dickens introduces two people, which are two of the characters of the novel: Messrs Bounderby and Gradgrind. They are walking within the town and going on reading, it seems as if the description of the city is made by them, through their eyes. Besides Dickens used a third person omniscient intrusive narrator, so the reader will find lots of intrusions within the text.

The way language is organised  and used allows the reader to carry out the narrator's point of view about Coketown. Indeed there are a lot of symbols within the text which enrich the description of the town. First of all  the reader can notice the materialistic way of describing the city because everything is described thanks to the use of senses. For example: it was a town of unnatural red and black...the river that ran purple...vast piles of building full of windows... These quotations reminds the idea of the atmosphere of pollution due to machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves, for ever and ever.

Moreover the city is very repetitive in colours and sounds, the monotony get inhabitants infected, people seems to have lost their personality and behaviour, they are equally like one another and look like robots. As a consequence, the idea of identity is now vanished and it seems as if the situation will never be turn into something good.

Reading on the reader can notice that Dickens shows a double face of Coketown; indeed the city is full of contradictions; on one hand there are bricks and ashes, on the other wealth and money. The double face of Coketown reminds the double nature of capitalism; capitalism was developing in that period and it had a lot of shades, indeed it produced prosperity as well as destruction and problems.

Cocketown is the archetype of the Victorian society, the idea of appearing well was the most important thing in the city, money was the engine of society and these ideas are connected to Utilitarianism, a system of thought that stated that whatever you have to do should be useful.

Going on reading it is important to notice that religion is important and the Church built in the centre of the town seems to be the centre of inhabitants' life.

To conclude, the reader can notice that the novelist uses a specific language, full of contradictons in order to convey the double face of industrialization and capitalism.