Charles Dickens: Coketown Essay
Coketown
The relatively short time period of the Victorian age, which stretched from 1837 to 1901, produced one of the most famous British writers, Charles Dickens (1812-1870), who was very skilled at portraying the very dark aspects of the Victorian Era through his works. The Victorian Era is known for its dramatic increase in population and industrial growth that brought along fast growing cities and a bigger use of machines, that were coal fueled, having an enormous impact on the appearance of major cities, that would become shrouded in soot and create a very sinister and dark sight. The appearance of such a town is a dominant theme in the excerpt of “Hard Times” (1854) by Charles Dickens. The text is very descriptive of how the city in which the story take place looks, in a very negatively toned manner.
The part of the novel “Hard Times” that is presented in “Coketown” is mostly as description by an omniscient narrator who gives us a very graphic presentment of the town in which the two characters, Mr. Bounderby and Gradgrind roam, whom the author chooses to ignore for the rest of the text, as he proceeds to picturesquely describe what he calls Coketown.
Coketown is depicted as a very monotonous place completely built from the same materials being red brick stone that, due to heavy pollution, have been dyed a very murky tint, from the massive amount of smoke coming from a lot of machinery and numerous chimneys. The smoke coming from these chimneys is described like menacing “… serpents of smoke…” (l. 9). These serpents resemble a biblical reference, as in the snake of Paradise; the devil. And the fact that these “snakes” cling to everything in Coketown in the form of black soot gives the impression that everything is covered in viciousness, corruption and evil; and under that thick layer of dirt is a red bricked city that looks the same everywhere you look. There is no diversity. Instead we have a place where “The jail might have been the infirmary,
The relatively short time period of the Victorian age, which stretched from 1837 to 1901, produced one of the most famous British writers, Charles Dickens (1812-1870), who was very skilled at portraying the very dark aspects of the Victorian Era through his works. The Victorian Era is known for its dramatic increase in population and industrial growth that brought along fast growing cities and a bigger use of machines, that were coal fueled, having an enormous impact on the appearance of major cities, that would become shrouded in soot and create a very sinister and dark sight. The appearance of such a town is a dominant theme in the excerpt of “Hard Times” (1854) by Charles Dickens. The text is very descriptive of how the city in which the story take place looks, in a very negatively toned manner.
The part of the novel “Hard Times” that is presented in “Coketown” is mostly as description by an omniscient narrator who gives us a very graphic presentment of the town in which the two characters, Mr. Bounderby and Gradgrind roam, whom the author chooses to ignore for the rest of the text, as he proceeds to picturesquely describe what he calls Coketown.
Coketown is depicted as a very monotonous place completely built from the same materials being red brick stone that, due to heavy pollution, have been dyed a very murky tint, from the massive amount of smoke coming from a lot of machinery and numerous chimneys. The smoke coming from these chimneys is described like menacing “… serpents of smoke…” (l. 9). These serpents resemble a biblical reference, as in the snake of Paradise; the devil. And the fact that these “snakes” cling to everything in Coketown in the form of black soot gives the impression that everything is covered in viciousness, corruption and evil; and under that thick layer of dirt is a red bricked city that looks the same everywhere you look. There is no diversity. Instead we have a place where “The jail might have been the infirmary,