The description of Coketown  belongs to the V chapter of the novel " Hard Times" written by  Charles Dickens in 1854. It is a rendering of the philosophy of utilitarianism by Jeremy  Bertham.  It underlines the material approach to life adopted by the people who lived in this period. Charles Dickens returns to the reader an alienated vision of Coketown. It was an imaginary town and the writer  had in mind a typical city during the Industrial Revolution. He took Manchester as a model  because it was the most industrialized city of the world.

The extract focuses on the importance of the coke, it is the fuel that allowed the production of industrial goods. Charles Dickens adopts a third person omniscient intrusive narrator and he privileges the technique of telling.

Coketown  is a town of red brick and of machinery and tell chimneys. The vast piles of building full of windows  and the large and small streets  like one another and also the people who live there like one another. Everything in Coketown is  workful.  The only exception is the church but the other buildings can be the contrary.

The first idea of the town the narrator provides the readers is that Coketown "was a triumphant of fact". People are interested in concrete reality because they have compelled to do so and the only alternative was starvation. Instead of saying that people are alienated he deprives his description from the presence of any human being so he implicitly says the personal  identity is a luxury that people in Coketown  couldn't afford. In Coketown people exist just to keep the great machine industry going and it implies that there is no room for fancy which is a mechanical from of imagination and also the architecture surrounding does not show any creativity.

The description given to the readers  is metonymic. The use of  colours  made by narrator is symbolical: there are red
and black in their different shares.  Closing to tell about the effect  Coketown  products, the narrator uses:  a simile " the painted face of a savage" ( the choice of the word savage focuses on the absence of civilization) and a metaphor "interminable serpents".Dickens uses a repetitive syntax to recreate the monotony of factory work in the readers, indeed people are compelled to work shift.

Comparing the description of Coketown by Charles Dickens and the description of Manchester by Alexis Tocqueville, the reader can immediately  understand the main differences: Coketown is a functional town while Manchester is a real city.

Both writers give a totally negative  judgement of Industrial Process and their description refers to nineteenth century.  A lot of
words  in the text provide to express a negative opinion of the town. Alexis Tocqueville criticizes the triumph of individual power and he condemns the non- intervention of the State. Indeed government doesn't  intervene  on worker condition,  he underlines how the land is violated and there aren't any regulating principles in Manchester.

This description of Coketown is a powerful condemnation of the dehumanizing effects of industrial society. This descriptions of landscapes and environment are not simply illustrative but it conveys to give a social and psychological  map of the situation they depict.

In both texts the writers use onomatopoeic words as " There was a rattling and a trembling all day long"  in  Hard Times and "The footsteps of a busy crowd, the crunching wheels of machinery, the shriek of the steam from boilers, the regular beat of the looms" to reinforce the idea of a noisy town.  Readers are involved in the reading process by the use of the language of sense impression.