Structural Analysis of COKETOWN by Charles Dickens
Dickens' first word makes immediately clear the setting: COKETOWN. The word “coke” takes the
reader attention, the reader expect the text to be about industrialization. He provides an apparently
positive judgment by describing it as a "triumph of fact". To tell the truth though it's just a pretext
to create a contrast with the absence of "fancy", a contrast that reminds to the double face of the
Industrial Revolution.
The introduction is refers to two characters Messers. Bouderdy and Gradgrind who are walking
towards the town. The narrator is a third person omniscient intrusive narrator and he influences the
reader.
After introducing, Dickens describes the city from a materialistic point of view by using sense
impression. The first sense he appeals to is sigh. The reader can imagine "a town of unnatural black
and red". The adjective "unnatural” is even more disparaging if combined with the colors of
damnation, black and red. With this sentence the narrator creates the idea of a damned city, the city
of Hell. In addition by using the similarity "like the painted face of a savage" he underlines, one
more time, the artificial and false nature of the town.
As the narrator goes on explaining where the “unnatural” comes from, the image of coketown
becomes more concrete. He keeps using senses to describe the brutality and sadness that were
affecting not only the landscape but people and thus society. He refers to the religious code. Indeed,
he uses the image of “interminable serpents" to represent the smoke that comes out from the
chimneys, serpents which, in a puritan society, like the one he was living in, symbolize the devil. It
was because of those reptiles that the canal was black and the river purple and smelly: they create
pollution which destroys the nature as well as industrialization destroys society. Moreover, the verbs
"rattling" and "trembling", which appeal to the sense of hearing and the onomatopoeically sound of
the pistons, that go up and down all day long give the reader a clear image of the monotony of
worker's lives. This image is reinforced by the anaphoric use of the adjective same ("same hours",
"same sounds", "same pavements", "same work”). With this brief description, Dickens creates an
obsessive and suffocated atmosphere that perfectly embraces the reality of that time.
All this, he adds, was in opposition with all the "comforts" and "elegancies" that were spreading all
over the world. But again, as Dickens did in the first paragraph by ironically describing coketown as
"a triumph of fact", this time he judges the Victorian society he's living in full of "fine ladies, who
could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned"; in few words where all that really matters is
appearance.
In the fourth paragraph the narrator keeps the reader's attention on monotony and sadness of town
life. In a industrialized town everything looked the same. The idea of oppression and rush is
conveyed by the anaphoric repetition of the word "fact". Fact reminds to something that has been
done by someone and so it's artificial and unnatural. Dickens uses this technique to inform the
intelligent reader that there is no room for change, there is any hope. People have lost their
personality, there isn’t the idea of identity.
In the fifth paragraph, the narrator openly criticizes an initially "triumphant" town only "sacred to
fact" to underline the importance of appearance and the totally absence of values of the society he
was living in. Nevertheless he makes the reader participant by posing him a question and making
him feel like he was there, in the 18th century Coketown. As Dickens goes on, the atmosphere
becomes more real. The detailed description of the city on a Sunday morning it's nothing more than
sad. It suggests, again, the possession and monotony of people's life. Indeed, the narrator uses the
repetition of the possessive adjective "own" (own quarter, own close rooms, own streets) and builds
a sequence of events connected with the temporal adverb "then". Nothing changes, even on
Sundays despite some more drunken people (either religious or not): that's how common people
lived.
All this mix of desperation, sadness, madness, monotony is finally put in contrasts with Mr.
Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, the two characters previously met. The few lines Dickens reserves
them at the very end of the paragraph may be seen as the little portion of society they represented:
the bad face. They were wealthy "gentlemen", never thankful and "eternally dissatisfied and
unmanageable". In his conclusion, the narrator uses the two men as a pretext to critics his society a
one, as already understood, full of contradiction by starting with people themselves; a one where
nothing was more important than appearance; a one where human beings were less important than
facts.
