TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF THE KEYNOTE, CHAPTER V, HARD TIMES (1854) BY CHARLES DICKENS

The text was written by Charles Dickens during the Industrial Revolution.

Right from the first phrase the narrator focuses the attention of the word "coke", which is the most important fuel. This word allows the reader to understand that the narrator wants to speak about industrialization of the cities.

Coketown was described by the allusion of "red brick", "smoke", "ashes", "unnatural red and black". It was a town of factory system, machinery and chimneys which produced an "interminable serpents of smoke", this is an expression to explain the negative image of smoke. The narrator refers to the term "serpent", according to the religious code: the serpent is the image of Evil.

After that the narrator refers to the description of the town, which was the same town and life of people who worked in it: there were the same sounds, the same pavements, and the same work. With these expressions the narrator wants to transfer to the reader the image of alienation, that people made the same work in the same hours and places and they hadn't a really life, they were how the robots.

There is also a reference to the semantic field of religion. The narrator explains that there was a Church built in the centre of the town and it was the only building different from the others, which had the same structures and the same colours. The Church had a steeple, which caught the attention of the people. It allows the reader to understand that religion were an important point of reference for the people. In that period the Protestant ethic declared the people were damned if they were not making progress in their life.

Finally Charles Dickens uses the metaphors to illustrate the physical problems and the mental disturbances caused by the developments of the Industrial Revolution.