Coketown
HARD TIMES ASSIGNMENT
DISCUSS: Dickens’ Coketown is not a city, rather a stage for the workings out of Gradgrind’s philosophy. Considering the above sentence examine the construction of the city in Hard Times.
Coketown is quite literally the ‘town of coke’, the raw material used to convert iron to steel and indirectly the foundation of the ‘steel/industrial revolution’. It is critical to analyze the name of the city for Dickens’ Hard Times is a satirical caricature on the condition of England in the 19th century. Dickens uses language as a powerful tool to put across his points or rather his ‘facts’. The inhabitants of Coketown have only one function, namely to work. Coketown is a city that feeds no needs besides what is useful there are no recreational areas etc. but only the brutal facts of working life. Speaking generally the city represents the negative effects Industrial Revolution and philosophic theories such as Utilitarianism and "the mercantile doctrine of Laissez-faire under which England 's factory system had flourished" (Allingham) have on the people. This situation is allegorized in the scene where Bitzer, the allegory of fact, chases Sissy, who represents imagination since she belongs to the circus, through Coketown.
” COKETOWN, TO WHICH MESSRS. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune. It was a town of red brick or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. 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. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all
DISCUSS: Dickens’ Coketown is not a city, rather a stage for the workings out of Gradgrind’s philosophy. Considering the above sentence examine the construction of the city in Hard Times.
Coketown is quite literally the ‘town of coke’, the raw material used to convert iron to steel and indirectly the foundation of the ‘steel/industrial revolution’. It is critical to analyze the name of the city for Dickens’ Hard Times is a satirical caricature on the condition of England in the 19th century. Dickens uses language as a powerful tool to put across his points or rather his ‘facts’. The inhabitants of Coketown have only one function, namely to work. Coketown is a city that feeds no needs besides what is useful there are no recreational areas etc. but only the brutal facts of working life. Speaking generally the city represents the negative effects Industrial Revolution and philosophic theories such as Utilitarianism and "the mercantile doctrine of Laissez-faire under which England 's factory system had flourished" (Allingham) have on the people. This situation is allegorized in the scene where Bitzer, the allegory of fact, chases Sissy, who represents imagination since she belongs to the circus, through Coketown.
” COKETOWN, TO WHICH MESSRS. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune. It was a town of red brick or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. 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. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all
Bibliography: Works cited- Modern Critical interpretation - Harold Bloom Critique of Materialism Dickens’ Writings Dickens at work Dickens and the Twentieth Century Class notes and the text Charles Dickens Studies – John Bowen and Robert L. Patten