Coketown by Charles Dickens - Criticism
This passage has come across a monotonous and dull town surrounded by industrialization. There is no colour, no aesthetic beauty but just buildings and factories that are an eyesore to the whole town.
This town was once a nice place and it was a town of ‘red brick’ but because of all the smoke, dust and dirt it has now all changed to black brick. There is no life left in the inhabitants of the town. They are just servers to the town and they aren’t even considered the characters of the passage. They are dehumanized and instead the buildings are the characters that take over. The buildings seem to literally take over the human qualities and are given priority and superiority to the people. There is no change or difference between one building and another. ‘The Jail might have been the infirmary; the infirmary might have been the jail’. There is a sense of sameness and uniformity.
