ACTIVITY ABOUT C.DICKENS

ACTIVITY I

-Buildings: red brick, tall chimneys; vast piles of buildings; chapels;
the New Church; infirmary; furnaces; house of common; jail; M'Choakumchild
school.

-Land: streets all like one another

-Water: river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye; black canal.

ACTIVITY II

• Accumulations and Contrast:

1) "It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if
the smoke and ashes had allowed it; it was a town of unnatural red and black
like the painted face of s savage."

2) "it was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which
interminable serpents of smoke railed themselves for ever and ever, and never
got uncoiled"

3) "the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like
the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness"

4) "the jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have
been the jail"

5) "large streets all like one another,
and many small streets still more like to another"         

• Comparing C. Dickens with A. de

The text is a narrative extract from the
novel "Hard Times"; the writer adopted a third person omniscient narrator
and he uses his imagination to describe the city. In his description he gives
to the reader a closed vision of Coketown because the city is based only on
FACTS. He also allowed the system of production during Victorian Age.

A.Toqueville' s description of
Manchester is an extract from "Journey To England And Ireland". He describes
the place giving a geographical description and he also criticizes industrialization
because individualism didn't permit to the society to grow. As Dickens, also A.
Toqueville makes the reader able to image the place appealing to senses, making
a contrast between what was natural and what was men made.

Both writers give a negative judgment
about industrialization but they give it in a different way: while A.
Toqueville is a foreigner visitor, Dickens lived the Industrial Revolution