Analysis of Coketown and Fire Imagery

The descriptions of Coketown evolve as the story moves from Book 1 to Book 2, signifying a change in the town’s way of thinking. In Book 1, Coketown is described as a very industrial town, that “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… Coketown did not come out of its own furnaces, in all respects like gold that had stood the fire.” (p. 27-28) Images of smoke, furnaces and fire create a dense and suffocating atmosphere, emphasizing the dry and machine-like aspects of the town. Significantly, the smoke never uncoils showing the towns insistence on staying the same, never evolving. However, in Book 2, Coketown is contrasted as a more bewildered town than it used to be: “A blur of soot and smoke, now confusedly tending this way, not that way, now aspiring to the vault of Heaven, now murkily creeping along the earth, as the wind rose and fell, or changed its quarter.” (p. 111) The fact that the soot and smoke now changes its path so often is a direct contrast to the “serpents of smoke” from earlier that never got uncoiled. The smoke symbolically shows Coketown’s change from a rigid town, to a town that is a softer version of its old self.

Additionally in Book 2, Dickens introduces a new image, an image of “frying in oil”, when he is describing Coketown: “The whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it, the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it, the mills throughout their many storeys oozed and trickled it. The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces was like the breath of the simoom; and their inhabitants, wasting with the heat, toiled languidly in the desert.” (112) This new imagery intensifies that notion of dry suffocation, describing the town as a “simoom” and “desert.” The imagery of fire is still present here, but Coketown has become a hotter, burning place where its citizens “waste with the heat.” In Book 1, there was ash, soot and smoke—all aftermaths of fire. Yet now, the town seems to be caught right in the middle of the blazing flames that bring about change and reform. Even the Hands of time, who seemed to be the all-knowing guide of Coketown, were “soiled with it” as it no longer had control of its own town.