SGiannangeli - Coketown Textual Analysis

I am going to analyse an extract from “Hard Times” by Charles Dickens. The passage deals with the description of an industrialized town called Coketown. The intelligent reader understands that the name of the town has a specific meaning: indeed, coke means “fuel”, “coal”, so the name “Coketown” underlines the main feature of the town. As a matter of facts, Coketown houses many industries that exploit coal as a fuel.

The narrator is an external and omniscient third person narrator who accurately describes realistic scenes, adding some funny and grotesque elements in order to entertain the reader and strike his attention and empathy.

The extract begins with the word “Coketown”, the writer immediately introduces the topic of the paragraph and sets his narration. The first element that the narrator mentions is that Coketown is “a triumph of facts”, where concrete facts represent the most important values and the only valuable elements of people and society’s life. In the first part, the author also presents the characters of the extract, and exploits irony in order to entertain the reader. After that, the narrator claims that it’s relevant to describe the setting before going on with the events: he defines “Coketown” the “key-note”.

The first element that the narrator tells the reader about the town, is that it is made of red bricks, and he ironically adds that it would be red if the dark colour of ash and smoke didn’t cover it, so that the first impression of the reader is that Coketown is a dark and dirty place, entirely built by austere and thick bricks, indeed, he compares it to the face of a savage painted in red and black. Going on with the description, Coketown is presented as full of machinery and chimneys that emanated tons of smoke trails that are compared to snakes. The town is incredibly monotonous, this image is given by the frequent repetitions such as “like one another”, also, its rhythm is compared to “an elephant in a state of melancholy madness”. The language used by the narrator and the several similes and repetitions have the function of emphasize the town’s features. So, the city is absolutely anonymous and depersonalised, just like its inhabitants that are deprived of their identity, and are described like robots that repeat the same actions every day.

Then, the narrator opposes the misery and decadence of the town to the luxury of the places around it where rich people live, exploiting the working class that is forced in Coketown and many other industry towns. The contrast is created and reinforced by some exaggerate expressions such as “the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned” and “comforts of life” or “elegancies of life” that underline the social and economic divide that characterised the Industrial Revolution’s society.

The narrator then underlines as every building was exactly the same, underlining once and again the anonymousness of the town: even religious buildings were all the same, because every place had been built according to an industrial and pragmatic mentality which only focused on the functionality of the buildings. A hyperbolic language contributes to create a grotesque description where elements are exasperated with the aim of involve the reader and strike him, for example “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”.

At the end of the extract, the narrator wants once and again to underline the pragmatic mentality that is strictly linked to the capitalistic ethic and the industrial production: only material and concrete facts are relevant, whereas relationships between humans, and other abstract values such as respect, equality where considered not relevant in favour of opportunistic and class-conscious ties between people.

The writer indirectly criticises this kind of society, trying to make people take awareness of many people’s living conditions but at the same time he makes the description funny and entertaining through the use of a hyperbolic and detailed language and idiomatic expressions.