Coketown is a text taken from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Coketown it is a fictional name. It is a narrative text, his name is symbolical and it refers to coal the most important fuel for that time. The novel and in particular the text, displays the most important figures of the Utilitarianism philosophy. The Utilitarianism philosophy is the principle advanced by Jeremy Bentham, and it is responsible of the Protestant effect that is beyond Victorian age and the development of industrialization. People believes that thanks to machinery they could improve the prosperity of the class and this lead the basis for the progress of the British industry in the first half of the 19th century. On one side you record the expansion of the industrial city and the growth of welfare, on the other city were overcrowded and lacked the most basic hygienic conditions and workers were generally subjected to long hours of work. This was the result of a policy of the state non-interference in economy.

Coketown is about a typical Victorian city that is an industrial, monotonous, artificial and material one. Everything that people has to do has to be useful.  Utilitarianism allows the development of a very rich society, in order to pointed out the Victorian age contradictions.

The scene is taken from the novel and while the two characters, Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind, are walking along the street, the narrator descripted the town. The main aim of a description is to create a mental picture of the place the novelist is telling about.

But also the use of the language and the narrative technique add meaning to it. The extract opens saying that Coketown "was a town of red brick": the verb "was" shows the city as if it were entirely and only made of brick. Right from the very first paragraph the reader understand that there is an intrusive narrator. Let us underline that there is an interaction between the narrator and the reader. Indeed, an anaphorically structure contributes to the meaning of a town where everything is repeated. Color red is not exactly red because it has something black due to the smoke of the chimney, connected to the idea of the serpent that tempts Eva. In adding information about the town, the typical element that allow the industrial revolution recalls over and over again: machinery and tall-ciminyes. This add a negative connotation to the ciminyes, anticipated by the adjective unnatural. Furthermore, he compares the town with the painted face of a savage to focus on the lack of civilization. Coketown contained several large streets and small ones all very like to one another. Even people, who lived there, are all like one another and they go in and out at the same hours, "with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next". In these lines it is possible to recognize a mass of people without soul, alienated and dominated by monotony and by the wild rhythm that industrial life implies. The monotony is also mirrored in the aspect of the city and it is underlined by the repetition of the word "like one another" and "same".

There is also a very frequent reference to time, for ever and ever, and never, that seemed to suggest the situation was not going to end. Also in describing the canal, the color back underline the darkness, the hell, the pollution. The color of the water is red, the color of blood. In addition, the working day of the machinery is punctuated by the alliterative use of the language. All the color use by the narrator are black, red and grey because they convey an idea off a suffocative city. The image suggested to the steam engine, one of the most important figure of the Industrial Revolution, moreover its icon. The narrator speak about the monotone way of the work. Everything is artificial, the situation seems never to end and men cannot escape. In addition, the narrator appealed to sense impression in order to give the idea of an artificial and industrial city: buildings are no more red, but they are almost black because of the smoke and ashes of factories, the canal (artificial) is black and the river run purple with ill-smelling dye. What's more everyday there is a short and sharp sound and a trembling all day long because of the piston that goes up and down (ironically compared to an elephant, who shakes his head in a state of rapture). 

The repetition of syntactical structure creates the monotony and suffocative atmosphere. Repetitions create parallelism between people and their work. People had lost their particular identity, they do always the same things. Everything was strictly connected to work. Nothing made life easier. “You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful”.

The narrator relies on a metonymy structure. The chapel refers to the entire church. This town is the icon of the industrial revolution and his contradiction. It create wealth but the absence of wealth being.

The second part of the extract focuses more the attention on public buildings, which house institutions, especially the church. As everything in Coketown, the church (not accidently called "warehouse") has a function: sometimes it has a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The conformation and the red brick convey the loss of identity and Marx’s alienation. The metaphor of the bell becomes the metaphorical representation of Coketown. The narrator speak about “short pinnacles like florid wooden legs” to refer to the sexual repression of the Victorian age. 

The narrator suggest the idea of a society built up according to the Manichean philosophy. Besides, the monotony of the city is pointed out again: the architecture of public buildings is always the same: "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". If you are bed you go to jail, to hell, if you are good you recognize God bless and you go to heaven. All the building are the same everything was similar.

In the second sequence of the text, the typical architecture of the Victorian age was descripted. The narrator in order to describe the town uses metonymy, red brick instead the part for the all. Even if the narrator appeals to the sight, the color that he uses to portrait the town are unnatural. The color underlines the artificiality of the town in an indirect way. It refers to the way buildings were been built. Even in the architecture, the monotony comes to light. The narrator indeed uses the color to connote the geographical elements. The colors acquires an additional and symbolical meaning. The narrator conveys the idea that nothing was connected to emotions and nothing was attractive. The material aspect is already pointed out from C. Dickens' choice about the theme: he focused his attention on buildings and on the way the city looks like, without giving space to its inhabitants. 

In the last part of the extract C. Dickens clearly reveals materialism, which afflict the city and its inhabitants: he writes that everything in Coketown is fact and the idea is highlighted by the repetition of this last word. Even school, design, relations between master and man are all fact. So, in Coketown there is no place for imagination, for something that couldn't be useful or for something irrational because "what you couldn't state in figures [...] was not and never should be". “Fact, fact, fact everywhere”. Coke town was the trial of fact, of something material. Immaterial things have something to do with imagination and emotion. You cannot image and always is the same. Even the way of people are educated are based on fact. The paragraph ironically ends with the word Amen.