Oct 13, 2008
Coketown. Fictional factory town in northern England that offers nothing that is not “severely workful.” Coketown is center of Dickens’s social criticism. As “a triumph of fact,” it is grim, unnatural, and mechanical, from the polluted purple river to the identical laborers who all “do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow.” Forested with the smokestacks of its textile mills, it is a “sulky blotch upon the prospect,” abandoned by the sun even in sunny midsummer. Its tenements, such as Stephen...
[The entire page is 911 words long]
©2000-2008
Enotes.com Inc.
All Rights Reserved