Hard Times

7 Pages 1839 Words

a canal is of dark color, firstly, because of pollution, secondly, at symbolic level, because the town lacks an identity. Dickens describes it as being ‘severely workful’ but significantly it is also in a “state of melancholic madness”, because everything in the town is dedicated to production.
Coketown’s buildings are faceless. With bitter irony, Dickens describes the confusion between identifying the “infirmary” and the “jail” – utilitarian practicality has deprived each of them of its own air and made the process of healing in an “infirmary” be of little difference from serving a sentence in a “jail”. Even the Church is not different from a “warehouse” – a building used to store the products of the industrial process. The Church was affected by industrialization and utilitarianism. Its decorations are compared by Dickens to the “wooden legs” of a piano – items manufactured in great amounts, looking totally alike and hence lacking any identity. The destructive effect of Utilitarianism seemingly affected even the spiritual aspect of life.
The picture is made more complete by the addition of description of the streets – “very like one another” and the final stroke of the brush is Dickens’ epithet:
“Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of town; fact, f...