Textual analysis – Charles Dickens, “Coketown” from Hard Times

In the present text I am going to make a deep analysis of Coketown, an extract taken from Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times.

The title “Coketown”, composed by the words “coke” and “town”, sets immediately the story in a polluted and grey city, conveying a sense of darkness and oppression. The reader expects nothing but a gloomy atmosphere from the text.

Looking at the layout, it appears clear that the text is actually a piece of narrative divided into paragraphs.

The very first line introduces two characters, Mr. Bounderby and Gradgrind. Their names both suggest something about them: Bounderby reminds of the world “bounder”, a morally reprehensible person, while Gradgrind (grad-grid) evokes the idea of someone who rejects knowledge and education. Such analysis enhances the feelings previously conveyed by the title. Their presence in the city is meant to introduce the reader in city, described as “a triumph of fact”: it means that what really mattered were not feelings, but facts and concreteness. Going on with the reading process, the third-person narrator adds more details about Coketown, such as “it had no grater taint of fancy than Mrs. Gradgrind” (and ironical comment, which implies that the narrator is intrusive).

The following paragraph begins with a description based on colours: the red of the bricks is covered by smoke and ashes, making the buildings look of an “unnatural red and black”, compared to the paint used on a savage’s face. The simile confers a further idea of graveness, almost danger. “It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled ” connects factories to the idea of sin, since serpents are a symbol of wickedness and remind of the biblical episode of the original sin. Coketown appears to be a place where nothing good can survive. The description based on colours continues: the narrator shows a black canal and purple river with “ill-smelling dye”: industrialisation ruined every element, infecting it as a sort of illness (therefore the text reports about a ill-smelling dye). Then there are some adjectives related to the auditive area: “rattling” and “trembling”, which evoke an unpleasant and creepy sound. The reader can feel the graveness and monotony of the city by the description of the piston of the steam-engine which worked “monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness”.  Such feeling of repetitiveness and lack of identity is conveyed also by the following statement: “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, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next”.

The third paragraph enhances how the city was bound to factories, actually being completely dependent on them. Moreover, the narrator makes a contraposition between Coketown and the “comforts of life which found their way all over the world”, therefore highlighting the unpleasantness of the city.

The last paragraph recalls the first line (“Coketown [...] was a triumph of fact”), since it is stated, referring directly to the reader, that whatever in the city was nothing but severely workful. Even churches could be nothing but “a pious warehouse of red bricks” like the rest of the buildings in the place. The choice of using churches as an example of the anonymity and concreteness of the city is meaningful: religion itself, something usually seen as pure and inviolable, was contaminated by industrialisation. The intelligent reader will immediately remind of the passage where the narrator makes implicitly reference to the original sin when describing the smoke coming out of the chimneys.

Proceeding with the analysis, the last lines of the text again evoke a sense of sameness and concreteness; the narrator indeed states that facts where both in the material and immaterial aspects of the city. After a long list of examples of things that were facts, it is reported that “what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen”.  In Coketown there was place for nothing but evaluable items, and such condition would never change. The passage ends with a religious quotation (world without end, Amen), which underlines the immutability of the city and gives the narrator a formal and prophetic tone. The religious reference makes the reader reflect: industrialisation has been brought to exasperation, and indeed a sort of religious fanaticism.

The language adopted by the narrator is formal and rich in similes and metaphors, which contribute to the description of Coketown.