Analysis of COKETOWN by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens’ Hard Times is one of the most relevant novels about industrialization and its consequences in England. In particular, a large part of chapter 5 is dedicated to the description of Coketown, an imaginary city which becomes the archetype of the industrialized town of the 19th century, very similarly to Manchester, the greatest English industrial town. 
The narrator is a third person omniscient intrusive narrator and he influences the reader.

Dickens' first word makes immediately clear the setting: COKETOWN. The word “coke” takes the reader attention: the reader expect the text to be about industrialization as “coketown” reminds to coal – the most important fuel during the Industrial Revolution. The writer provides an apparently positive judgment by describing it as a "triumph of fact". However, in the same paragraph, it is said that “it had no fancy in it”, so the reader becomes aware that there is a contrast between materiality and fantasy, and in Coketown the first has killed the latter. The intelligent reader may also interpret this sentence as an attack towards all the systems which advocate massification and the destruction of the individual to keep people under control, while they pretend to do that for the “good of society”. Dickens probably thought that fancy would have destroyed the system of production in Coketown, making workmen conscious of their unbearable working conditions.

The introduction refers to two characters Messers. Bouderdy and Gradgrind  who are walking towards the town, whose colors were: red, due to bricks, and black, due to smoke and ashes. These colors immediately remind of Hell and damnation, which were highly taken into consideration in a Puritan world. Moreover, black and red are defined “unnatural”, since nature has been completely removed from Coketown, and they create a sense of repulsion in the inhabitants. The city is described from a materialistic point of view by using sense impression,"a town of unnatural black and red". With this sentence the narrator creates the idea of a damned city, the city of Hell. 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. The description of the town is based on sight, hearing and even sense of smell; this is done on purpose to describe the brutality and sadness that were affecting not only the landscape but also people -seem just like an appendix of Coketown- and thus society. 
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”). With this brief description, Dickens creates an obsessive and suffocated atmosphere that perfectly embraces the reality of that time. 

All that quoted so far was in opposition with all the "comforts" and "elegancies" that were spreading all over the world. As Dickens did in the first paragraph by ironically describing Coketown as "a triumph of fact", this time he judges the Victorian society he's living in full of "fine ladies, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned"; in few words what that really matters is appearance. 

The fanatic devotion to “facts” is hyperbolically and sarcastically described in the following paragraph: even religion cannot do without this mad system of thought, and if a chapel was built, it was “a pious warehouse of red brick”, where the words “pious” and “warehouse” are ironically put together to show how religion was an ulterior way to remind people of their earthly mission, which was not earning the right to access Heaven by good actions, but producing in industries. In this paragraph the narrator keeps the reader's attention on monotony and sadness of town life. In a industrialized town everything looked the same. The idea of oppression and rush is conveyed by the anaphoric repetition of the word "fact", which 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. Therefore the paragraph is preposterously closed by the word “amen” comparable to “let it be” which gives no hope in a change.