ACTIVITIES CHARLES DICKENS’ COKETOWN :

ACTIVITY 1

buildings: buildings are made by the red bricks, bricks are grey because of the smoke from factories, there is a presence of machinery and tall chimneys, Church was made by red bricks as well, jails, infirmary.

land : small and large streets,

water : black canal, a river become purple.

ACTIVITY 2

ACCUMULATION:

Here some examples in which Dickens accumulates adjectives and words in order to point out clearly his vision of society.

Ø  “Vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like

the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.”

Ø  “Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial

Ø  “The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen”

CONTRAST:

While here some other examples in which the novelist uses some contrasts.

Ø  “ It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye.”

Ø  “All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white.”

Ø  “The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction.”

In her novel “Why be Happy when you could be normal”l the writer J.Winterson writes a description of Manchester from and emotional point of view. Indeed Charles Dicken’s Coketown, probably inspired by Manchester itself is a negative description of the a city in which the Industrial Revolution is the chief of lifestyle. C.Dickens uses lots of repetitions, contrasts ( Black and red which simbolize hell and damnation) and sinonyms to underline his bad opinion about Coketown. In fact the city is dominted by fact, and the individual is sacrified for the society. J. Winterson writes a memoire, so to her Manchester represents a good placet o be born. She judges from her personal point of view, (she is a woman born in 1959, hundred years later than Dickens) so she has the opportunity to consider Manchester from a completely different side.