In the present text I’m going to analysis an exact taken from chapter five of “Hard Times”, a novel by Charles Dickens.

In chapter 5 a large part focuses on the description of Coketown, an imaginary city that reflects the period of the Industrial Revolution. The reader is introduced to the city thanks to two characters, Mr Bounderby and Mr. Gradgrind, who are walking to it. The reader immediately understands that the narrator is a third person omniscient and intrusive narrator: thanks to the sentence “let us strike the keynote, Coketown, before pursuing our tune” the narrator enter the text.
Introducing Coketown as “a triumph of fact” the narrator reminds to the materialism and concreteness of the city: there was no place for creativity but just for work.
The town is depicted by different colors: the brick of "unnatural red and black", "black canal", "the river that ran purple” and it’s evident the atmosphere of pollution due to the tall chimneys and machinery that work continuously "for ever and ever”.
These colors immediately remind to Hell and damnation as well as the idea of “interminable serpents of smoke” reminds to the original sin.
The description of the city is not only based on colors but also on hearing and smell. However, the image conveyed by the narrator is the one of a brutal and sad city, where monotony reigns. Indeed, the idea 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 repetition of the adjective “same” ("same hours", "same sounds", "same pavements", "same work”) that underlines the loss of people’s personality and individuality as well. They are equally like one another and look like robots. The ripetitive life in Coketown, symbol for the industrialized cities of the 19th century, brought to alienation.
Moving on, the narrator compares the attributes of Coketown with all the comforts of life all over over the world. In this way, Mr. Dickens wanted to brought to surface the contradiction of the Victorian age: part of the population was exploited in factories, while the upper classes lived with comforts and elegances thanks to this exploitation.
In Coketown everything should be workful, even religion become in a certain way a work, indeed churches seem to be functional places, “warehouses”. It emerges the Utilitarian ethic, where everything had to be useful, or it didn't have even to be. The idea of utilitarism and materialism is underlined by the repetition of the word “fact”. The anaphoric repetition of the word “fact" conveys the idea of oppression and impossibility to change the situation as well. The expression "was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen” that closes the extract reinforce this idea.