COKETOWN

Coketown is an extract of the book Hard Times by Charles Dickens. The passage is centered on the description of the industrial centre of Coketown, a the typical industrial city in England during the Industrial Revolution.

Disckens uses a lot of similes and metaphors in order to better give us an idea of the city: there are some problems in Coketown as the long smoke clouds which went out from the chimneys and dispersed in the sky (as a snake). All houses are built with red bricks but they are allowed by smokes and ashes, which also doesn’t permit people to see clearly. The river is black and polluted. Streets are similar to each other too. It goes without saying that all of these elements create monotony and sadness. Coketown is total crushed by the industrialization. The idea of monotony is emphasize by the use of repetition of words and phrases. It follows that people who live here look like machines and robots (they wake up, eat, work and sleep). Inhabitants have not a soul so Coketown has not one too.

The intelligent reader can notice the juxtaposition between the sadness and the flourishing productivity of the city. The products were destined to high social classes, who lived in rich and luxurious houses and didn’t know what was an industrial city as Coketown.

Dickens uses a lot of irony to criticize the society of the Victorian Age but he also wants to denounce the terrible conditions of living that the Industrial Revolution had brought to the world.