Hard Times – Coketown Essay, Research Paper

The mood that Dickens creates in ?Hard Times? is a very dark and polluted mood that portrayed in Coketown. James Harthouse describes Coketown upon arriving in it saying that it is an ?extraordinarily black town? (p. 92). Also, in a conversation with Mrs. Sparsit, he inquired, ?Will you allow me to ask if it?s always as black as this?? (p. 92). She answers ?In general much blacker? (p. 92). The mood of this town is a dark area covered with ashes from the factory chimneys. The bricks in Coketown should be red, but because of the ashes that are processed out of the chimneys blackens the bricks. ?It was a town of red bricks, or of brick that would have been red if the smokes and ashes had allowed it? (p. 22). Tension is created when Dickens uses his monotonous tone to describe the city. ?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 pavement, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday as tomorrow?? (p. 22). This description of the town and the workers creates tension with what we know today. We live in a society that is diverse and original. Everybody is different in character and features, but in the world that Dickens portrays, everybody seems to be the same, which is very haunting. They are like robots programmed to work at the same place, same time. Another haunting image that Dickens portrays is the smoke coming out of the chimney. He characterizes the smoke saying ?a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled? (p. 22). This serpent characteristic gives this town a very demonic image that carries on to define Coketown to be fantastically haunting.