LBravo_Homework 25/03/2019

Hard Times, “Coketown”. Analysis of the extract from chapter 5.

Considering how the city described in this extract is named, the intelligent reader is able to suppose from the beginning of the chapter that it is a city that has been deeply modified by the Industrial Revolution, indeed coke was the most used raw material in this period.

The city is told to be a “triumph of fact”, but this is in contrast with the fact that Mrs. Gradgrind is told to be the fanciest thing of the city, so under the lines the narrator is sarcastic in doing the first statement.

The town is depicted by three main colours: red (of the brick, that has become grey due to the smog), black (of a canal passing through it) and purple (of a river of the city). These colours set a gloomy and grievous atmosphere, amplified by the strong presence of “serpents of smoke” and machineries, and by the metaphor that compares the town to the “painted face of a savage”.

The city appears also monotonous, indeed it is told that “there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness”.

The monotony is not only a proper feature of the town, but also of its inhabitants, indeed the two things are compared one to the other; this fact is underlined in the following passage, also through the insertion of a lot of repetitions: “It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went 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 to-morrow”. People are identical: indeed, they work in the same conditions and do the same things, and also their future is uniformed: nothing can be changed in their life, because they are just a part of an “assembly line” and the society is characterized by immobility, as the last phrase I reported shows.

The lines “against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned” show the great difference between who produced and who detained and exploited the production, people that lived in uncomfortable conditions and people that lived in very comfortable ones, a situation denounced also by Karl Marx in his work “The Capital”.

The text goes later on underlining once and again how this town was monotonous and alienating, indeed also the places where people should have expressed their religious beliefs (something personal) is alike any other building of the town. This fact is better expressed in the following lines, that contain also a chiasmus and a lot of repetitions: “The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the townhall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery”.

The text finally ends expressing how anything that wasn’t “purchasable” was lacking of value in that period.