TEXTUAL ANALYSIS: Coketown, from C.Dickens’ Hard Times

The text starts with the word “Coketown” that allows to understand the topic of it. In fact I suppose the extract will be about the city. The name Coketown reminds to the fuel used during the Industrial Revolution. 

Right from the first sentence of the description you can notice that there is a third person narrator who is omniscent and gives judgment and personal remarks about the city: he would like to underline the consequences of the Industrial Revolution starting from the description of the city.

The first paragraph has an introductory function: it describs two people walking towards Coketown and then it starts telling about its characteristic.

The city is described mainly focusing on the colours and sounds of it: in fact the reader immediatly comes across the colour of the bricks, that would have been red but now it is black. The writer gives importance to colours because they represent the change of the city. The red brick that becomes black because of the smoke and so machinery, factory and industrialization gives evidence to unnatural. Dickens focuses also on water: canals and river became black and purple and they had a terrible ill-smelling due to dye. The writer uses metaphors and similies like serpents of smoke, the head of and elephant in a state of melancholy and pinnacles like florid wooden legs to help the reader to imagine the real appearance of Coketown. 

From a general look to the city, the writer goes in dept telling about the streets and finally about the people who lived there. Here, he uses the repetition “like on another” to trasmitt the idea of the indutrialized city which gives no oppotunities to men, no greater taint of fancy: it is only a triumph of facts where the only thing that matters is work: all streets seem the same like people who lives an unvaried day and every day is the same of yesterday and tomorrow and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. Buildings are one like the near one too: it was impossible to recognise the function of one of the buildings if you cannot read the public inscrtiptions. The writer says that everything was linked by facts. Then he stats to describe the kind of people living there: people were undevore, in very bad conditions, drunk, opium smokers, who restoreted to low haunts.

In opposition of this situation the writer tells about the other side of the coin: the life of the people who became rich thanks to industries and so who live in comforts, elegancies. So here comes out the double face of capitalism linked to the Industial Revolution.

Finally he returns to the opening situation, to the two gentleman, that belong to the rich part of society, and the writer, who, as I have already said, is omniscent, analize their thoughts: that people who lives in Coketown in those conditions were eternally be dissatisfied and unmanageable and they would never thank for what Industrialized brought to them.

ACTIVITY 

Buildings: red/black briks, tall chimneys, vast piles of building full of windows, New Church ( stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door terminating in four short pinnacles) → all the poublic inscriptions in the town were painted alike in severe characters of lack and white

Land: large streers all very like one another, small streets more like one another

Water: black canal, purple river with ill-smelling dye

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS: Manchester, by Tocqueville

The text starts with a description of a land which seems natural and untouched by men. Then the writer introduces the human works on nature starting from the canals and, after that, the palaces and hovels scattered that shows the powers of man.

From that, Tocquville tells about the effects of Industrialization in the city: thity or fourty factories that rise on the hills just described. So he gives a judgment (the narrator is omniscent): men desecreates a wondeful natural place building factories of six stories. Around these factories there are the houses for poor worker people and uncoultivated land that are no more nature but not even city: it is the sign of hurried and unfinished work. This concept is linked to the rapidity of the develop of industrialization. From the descroption of Tocquville comes out a negative point of view of Industialization, due to population bent on gain that would like to became rich. Tocquville creates a contrast beween the horror of the poor people condition of life and the place where the landlords lived: a medieval town with the marvels of the ninteenth century, quarters set apart.

Then he returns to the description of the poor side of Manchester: narrow and twisting roads full of puddles and ruts, fetid and muddy water stained with colours due to the factories. He focuses the reader’s attention on sounds (the noise of furnaces, whistle of steam), on sight (black smoke, keep light out, sun like a disc without rays). In few words the situation can be described by the senence: the wealth of some and the poverty of most (the double face of capitalism).

ACTIVITY

Buildings: scattered palaces and hovels, thirty or forty six storied factories, narrow and twisting roads, full of puddles and ruts.

Land: An undulating plain, little hills, a narrow river (the Irwell), three canals made by man 

Water: fetid, muddy, stained with colours by industries