: How is Coketown described? Does this affect the people living in this town?
Answers
Answer:
*Explanation*
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 buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.
Coketown is therefore essential as a setting epitomising the negative aspects of industrialisation and the mechanisation of the human soul. The description of Coketown makes it clear that it is not a place of enjoyment or pleasure or nature - rather, the only thing it encourages is dull, repetitive and endless labour. Dickens wrote this novel as a protest against industrialisation and how it was in danger of turning humans into machines and denying their creativity and imagination. Coketown, then, is his creation showing this transformation in process.