Hard Times: Coketown

In " Hard Times: Coketown" Charles Dickens is assessing industrialization and the effect it had on the people in the towns in which they resided. Coketown seems to be portrayed as a city of work and not anything else. It is put across that the town consists of only fact and nothing else to alleviate the dullness. Charles Dickens is sharing his analysis on the social issues implicated in this town through a narrative that reflects upon the environment. He uses a lot of descriptions and similes to show the implications in which the society is inflicting. For example, the steam engine is constantly going up and down is "like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness," (1057). He also uses metaphors like "it had a black canal," and "interminable serpents of smoke" (1057). He is portraying a point that the government in this town is not caring enough about there community so therefore he feels he needs to get the message across about how socially unacceptable this is. As he conveys these ideas to the reader he uses representation to give an object human life. An example when he gives an object a human life structure is; "It was a town of unnatural red and black like a painted face of a savage,"(1057). By doing this he was stressing the importance of how nothing is progressing and the politicians need to take another look at the communities whole social and living structure. He makes inferences on industrialization and the effect that it has like "the river ran purple" and "it had a black canal in it" (1057) This is just showing how much out of hand the social concern of industrialization had got to and how pollution had got to a big height. "It was a town of red brick or of red brick if that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it," (1057). This shows how bad the living conditions were getting and he probably felt the politicians in there town were not doing anything to fix these conditions. "It was very strange to walk through the streets on a Sunday morning, and note how few of them the barbarous jangling of bells that was driving the sick and nervous mad." (1058) Now he was stressing how the community itself didn't even know where they fit in as a social foundation. The main problem to Dickens was that the political and social issues of this town were worsening since none was caring enough to change anything. He basically is revealing the mistreatment of industrialization in this society and is implying towards the social disgraces that have occurred. He retorts," fact, fact fact'" (1058) just to show even more how dull the lives of the poor became a repeating every day thing. It became the same because it seemed like every day was a desperate day to survive in this new industrialized world. To me a major social implication made a point in this short story was of a corrupt society that the politicians were more interested in productivity than in the health and happiness of its citizens.