The extraxt is taken from the 5th chapter of Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times (1854) and it’s called Coketown.

The intelligent reader can understand how Dickens uses a “symbolic” name to talk about the archetype of an industrial city.

In fact coke means coal, the “basic matter and the fuel of industrialization” used to keep the steam-engine machines working.

The third person intrusive writer starts describing the city from a negative point of view.

He introduces the city  as a “triumph of fact” filled with “black canals” and a purple river. As we can note, the colors are surreal on porpoise, to underline the degrade of the city and its state of pollution.

Last but not least they assume also a symbolic meaning, the colors red and black (“the brick of innatural red and black”), could symbolize the darkness and fire of an hell of the sufferance that last “for ever and ever”.

The city becomes a mix of horrible noises and smells, while evil serpents of smoke crawl continually around the moving pistons with an annoying ripetitivness, like the poor inhabitants’ monotonous life.