Analysis of the description of Coketown from Dickens’ Hard Times

Charles Dickens’ Hard Times is one of the most relevant novels about industrialization and its consequences in England. In particular, a large part of chapter 5 is dedicated to the description of Coketown, an imaginary city which becomes the archetype of the industrialized town of the 19^th century, very similarly to Manchester, the greatest English industrial town.

The name “Coketown”, which appears at the very beginning of the passage, reminds the reader of coal, the most important fuel during the Industrial Revolution, since it was used to power up steam engines and other machineries. The writer also describes the town as a “triumph of fact”, thus showing an apparently positive point of view; however, in the same paragraph, it is said that “it had no fancy in it”, so the reader becomes aware that there is a contrast between materiality and fantasy, and in Coketown the first has killed the latter. The intelligent reader may also interpret this sentence as an attack towards all the systems which advocate massification and the destruction of the individual to keep people under control, while they pretend to do that for the “good of society”. Dickens probably thought that fancy would have destroyed the system of production in Coketown, making workmen conscious of their unbearable working conditions.

Two colours dominate in Coketown: red, due to bricks, and black, due to smoke and ashes. These colours immediately remind of Hell and damnation, which were highly taken into consideration in a Puritan world. Moreover, black and red are defined “unnatural”, since nature has been completely removed from Coketown, and they create a sense of repulsion in the inhabitants.

The third paragraph consists in a very strong description of the town, based on sight, hearing, and even sense of smell: the landscape is filled with chimneys which eject black crawled columns of smoke, the rivers flow purple emitting an insupportable stink, the noise of pistons and steam engines is clearly audible everywhere. Moreover, in the same paragraph, it is interesting to notice that the description of streets in Coketown, which appear one like the other, is put cheek by jowl to the description of people, who also appear one like the other; thus people seem just like an appendix of Coketown, an element that is negligible in the greater picture, a collection of insects which are indistinguishable from each other, as Dickens magisterially shows in the repetition of the word “same” (“same hours”, “same sound”, “same work”), which also gives the idea of an obsessive rhythm. The rawness of Coketown is put into sharp contrast with the “fine lady”, who will probably “scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned”, even if all the products she uses are produced in Coketown; again there is a separation between product and producer: the product is something without life, which does not remind us of the tears, the sweat and the fatigue people put in producing it.

The fanatic devotion to “facts” is hyperbolically and sarcastically described in the following paragraph: even religion cannot do without this mad system of thought, and if a chapel was built, it was “a pious warehouse of red brick”, where the words “pious” and “warehouse” are ironically put together to show how religion was an ulterior way to remind people of their earthly mission, which was not earning the right to access Heaven by good actions, but producing in industries. The chapel itself had to remind people of a factory; Dickens is very explicitly saying that people were put under brainwashing.

The paragraph is preposterously closed by the word “amen”, which causes a sad smile on the reader’s face, since it is a dejected “let it be” which gives no hope in a change, unlike a prayer, where the word “amen” contains the hope of the churchgoer in God’s intervention.

Going on reading, the writer pretends to hear a question from the reader; it is asked if Coketown, which was “triumphant in its assertion”, “got on well” too. The reader may ingenuously think so, but Dickens denies it, and he also emulates the reader’s surprise in reading what sounds like a blasphemy (“Why not, not quite well. No? Dear me!”).

It follows a dismal description of the conditions of men and women in Coketown. They seem alienated and almost dead; in a Sunday morning, when people are usually happy because they have a day off, in Coketown the workers are nervous and mad, they look at the churchgoing as something “with which they had no manner of concern”, and even the jangling of the bells is a “barbarous jangling”. The writer also relates that there was a group of representatives of Coketown who was heard in the House of Commons, and these people proposed to the MPs some solutions to the problems affecting Coketown, but Dickens seems to think that the problems of Coketown were without solution, since the people, probably to avoid depression or suicide intentions, got drunk, looked for opium or went to brothels.

In the end, Dickens goes back to Mr Bounderby and Mr. Gradgrind, the two gentlemen he had introduced at the beginning of the chapter, stating that they could have produced “tabular statements” (as the ones produced by the representatives of Coketown) where it resulted that people in Coketown had lot of products (“they lived upon the best, and bought fresh butter; and insisted on Mocha coffee, and rejected all but prime parts of meat”), but they were anyway “eternally unsatisfied and unmanageable”. Thus the passage is sadly concluded by the image of a town where people have everything, but inside they have nothing.