Hard times: Chapter V

"Coketown"

The novel "Hard Times" written by Charles Dickens is set in one of the industrial towns of the north of England; its aim is to criticize, report and denounce the dehumanising aspects that the Industrial Revolution brought and caused in English industries.               

In the 5^th chapter of the novel, "Coketown", the writer describes a real city of the north of England: Coketown, the city of coke, to be a credit of coke, the principal material, protagonist of the Industrial Revolution.

Coketown is described as a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it, and for this reason it became a town of unnatural red and black (the black colour of smoke of the chimneys of industries).

Coketown was the city of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever; it was the city where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down.

That city was composed of a several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another; it was inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sounds upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the same of the last and of the next.

In Coketown people could not saw something because all things and edifices were similar to the others. The only exception was the New Church, a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscription in the town were painted alike in severe characters of black and white.