Coketown

Coketown is a novel written by Charles Dickens in 1854. Coketown is a description of a typical town in the Victorian age after the industrial revolution which occurred during the 18th century. Charles Dickens describes the other side of the coin during the Victorian age by using figure of speech in his description of the town: “Coketown […] was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, at matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. (line 1-3) He uses the figure of speech to describe how the smoke and ashes have painted the red bricks black, by comparing the colors with a “savage”. By doing this, Charles Dickens makes the description more accurate because the reader gets an even better picture of what it is he is trying to describe. Charles Dickens uses figure of speech numerous times. Among other things he compares a mad elephants’ head movement with the monotonously movement of a steam-engine and describes the many factories as “vast piles of building full of windows. The text is in general very melancholic, and it really makes the Victorian age look like rubbish. Charles Dickens is probably trying to show, that with the factories and the new way of life, life has become much more planned and organized but not necessarily better, because the individuality is gone and every day is like the one before: “inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. ”(line 10-13)