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Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune. 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 building 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. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work.
Charles Dickens, Hard Times for These Times, Oxford University Press, London, 1955, p.22.
PLACE: Lancashire manufacturing town.
TIME: During the 1850's
CIRCUMSTANCE: Descripton of a typical manufacturing town in England during the Industrial Revolution.
It was very strange to walk through the streets on a Sunday morning and note how few of them the barbarous jangling of bells that was driving the sick and nervous mad, called away from their own quarters, from their own close rooms, from the corners of their own streets, where they lounged listlessly, gazing at all the church and chapel going, as at a thing with which they had no manner of concern.
Charles Dickens, Hard Times for these Times, Oxford University Press, London, 1955, p.23.
PLACE: Lancashire manufacturing town.
TIME: During the 1850's
CIRCUMSTANCE: The bells, which used to be the most powerful sounds in pre-industrial towns, cannot attract the working class anymore. Even the author himself seems to dislike their sound in the context of this environment.
The Fairy palaces burst into illumination, before pale morning showed the monstrous serpents of smoke trailing themselves over Coketown. A clattering of clogs upon the pavement; a rapid ringing of bells; and all the melancholy mad elephants, polished and oiled up for the day's monotony, were at there heavy exercise again. Stephen bent over his loom, quiet, watchful, and steady. A special contrast, as every man was in the forest of looms where Stephen worked, to the crashing, smashing, tearing piece of mechanism at which he laboured.
Charles Dickens, Hard Times for These Times, Oxford University Press, London, 1955, p.69.
PLACE: Lancashire manufacturing town.
TIME: During the 1850's
CIRCUMSTANCE: A normal morning at the factory.
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