Scarica COKETOWN (Hard Times) - CHARLES DICKENS [in english] e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! COKETOWN (Hard Times) - CHARLES DICKENS Coketown is an extract from Hard Times, one of the most important and famous autobiographical novels written by Charles Dickens. This particular passage is centred on the description of the city where is set the whole story: this is Coketown. We can immediately deduce the theme of the novel only by knowing the title: in fact, this city is characterized by "coke", which refers to coal and, for this reason, to industry. So, Coketown is an industrial town. Starting from the beginning, we can know how this city was made, which were its main characteristics and principal elements. It was a town of red bricks but smoke and ashes had made them black; "this was a town of machinery and tall chimneys" and the smoke that came out of them is compared to a big and interminable serpent. So, we can deduce that industry was the main element in Coketown. Pollution had caused also another discomfort in Coketown, in addition to making bricks black: it had made the river becoming purple. So, clothes became smelly and dirty. Coketown was a city where everything was the same and everyone made the same things everyday of every year, interminably: people were alienated. Also, buildings were different inside but they were all the same in appearance and recognise the right one was very difficult: the jail could be the infirmary, the infirmary could be the jail, the town-hall could be either or both, or anything else. There were also: a chapel, a school, a school of design, an hospital and a cemetery and the only building that was different from the others was the New Church, which was an edifice decorated with stucco and with a square steeple over the door. People were very strange in Coketown: they were organized in associations and groups and they hate each other. The first organization mentioned is a native group that wanted to be heard in the House of Commons every session to make labouring people religious by force using an act of parliament. Another association was the Teetotal Society, which showed in tabular statements that these same people would get drunk and no inducement would convince them not to do it. Then, the druggist and the chemist came and proved, thanks to tabular statements, that workers didn't get drunk but that they took opium. After them the chaplain of the jail was mentioned. He denounced laborers for going and reuniting in hidden places laughing, singing and dancing indecently. The last ones who were mentioned were the two protagonists of the novel: Mr. Gradgrind, the master of the local school and his friend Mr. Bounderby. They furnished more tabular statements derived from their own personal experience and they proved that in Coketown there were people who stayed badly together because of their behaviour: they were never grateful, they were restless, they never knew what they wanted; they were always dissatisfied and undeserving. NARRATOR = That of Coketown was a third-person omniscient narrator who sometimes interacted with the reader involving him as part of the story. FIGURES OF SPEECH = In this passage there are different figures of speech and the most important are similes and metaphors.
