Coketown

Dickens' first word makes immediately clear the setting: the industrial city of Coketwn. The word “coke” takes the reader attention ("coke" means "carbone").

He provides an apparently positive judgment by describing it as a "triumph of fact". To tell the truth it's just a pretext to create a contrast with the absence of "fancy", a contrast that reminds to the double face of the Industrial Revolution. The introduction refers to two characters Messers. Bouderdy and Gradgrind who are walking towards the town.

The narrator is a third person omniscient narrator and he influences the reader; it is an intelligent choice, indeed the reader is free to make up different ideas. Dickens describes the city from the materialistic point of view by using sense impression; by that, the first sense he appeals to is sigh. The reader can imagine "a town of unnatural black and red", the color of damnation, giving the idea of a damnated city (the Victorian novel is generally set in the city, a place where identities are lost). In addition by using the similarity "like the painted face of a savage" he underlines, one more time, the artificial and false nature of the town.

As the narrator goes on explaining where the “unnatural” comes from, the image of coketown becomes more concrete. He keeps using senses to describe the brutality and sadness that were affecting not only the landscape but people and thus society. He uses the image of “interminable serpents" to represent the smoke that comes out from the chimneys, serpents which, in a puritan society, like the one he was living in, symbolize the devil.

Moreover, the verbs "rattling" and "trembling", which appeal to the sense of hearing and the onomatopoeically sound of the pistons, that go up and down all day long give the reader a clear image of the monotony of worker's lives. This image is reinforced by the anaphoric use of the adjective same ("same hours", "same sounds", "same pavements", "same work”). All this, he adds, was in opposition with all the "comforts" and "elegancies" that were spreading all over the world. Here again Dickens ironically judges the Victorian society he's living in full of "fine ladies, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. In a industrialized town everything looked the same.

The idea of oppression and rush is conveyed by the anaphoric repetition of the word "fact". Fact reminds to something that has been done by someone and so it's artificial and unnatural. Dickens uses this technique to inform the intelligent reader that there is no room for change, there is any hope. People have lost their personality, there isn’t the idea of identity. In the fifth paragraph, the narrator openly criticizes an initially "triumphant" town only "sacred to fact" to underline the importance of appearance and the totally absence of values of the society he was living in. Nevertheless he makes the reader participant by posing him a question and making him feel like he was there.

As Dickens goes on, the atmosphere becomes more real. The detailed description of the city on a Sunday morning it's nothing more than sad. It suggests, again, the possession and monotony of people's life. Indeed, the narrator uses the repetition of the possessive adjective "own" (own quarter, own close rooms, own streets). Nothing changes, even on Sundays despite some more drunken people (either religious or not): that's how common people lived. All this mix of desperation, sadness, madness, monotony is finally put in contrasts with Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, the two characters previously met. They were wealthy "gentlemen", never thankful and "eternally dissatisfied and unmanageable".

To conclude, the narrator uses the two men as a pretext to criticise the society full of contradictions; a one where nothing was more important than appearance; a one where human beings were less important than facts.