Carlo

Page 123 Passage Analysis

“Whether it was that the heat prevented Mrs. Sparsit from working, or whether it was that her hand was out, she did no work that night. She sat at the window, when the sun began to sink behind the smoke; she sat there, when the smoke was burning red, when the colour faded from it, when darkness seemed to rise slowly out of the ground, and creep upward, upward, up to the house-tops, up the church steeple, up to the summits of the factory chimneys, up to the sky”(123).

In this first chapter of Book one, James Harthouse’s unnamed introduction to the story acts out with a conversation with Mrs. Sparsit. As he leaves the bank, Mrs. Sparsit sits by her window, looking out to Coketown. The “unnatural red and black” (27) description of the town that was illustrated in Book One continues to be the image of Coketown in Book Two: the “smoke was burning red” and the town is “much blacker” than how it is when James Harthouse arrives in Coketown. However, the visual that the fire metaphor conveys in this passage is less bright, like a “fiery haze,” (95), and more dark – the black smoke of the town has become all encompassing, the “sun sank behind” the smoke, “colour faded from it,” and darkness started slowly“rising out of the ground, creeping upward.” The absence of fire and greater presence of darkness and smoke represents how in Book Two, the inner “fire” in each character begins to diminish. Louisa has married Bounderby, Thomas has become a captive in the Bank, and Stephen, shunned by his workers, leaves Coketown and then is suspected for the bank robbery. The small hope for something greater that Louisa yearned for – the fire that she long stared at – has been defeated by her marriage to Bounderby, stripping of her any hope of becoming an independent woman. Stephen’s integrity introduced in Book One has ended up being the cause of his sorrow in Book Two, and Thomas’s innocence – having to be defended by his sister when they were younger at the circus – has vanished and he has become a more selfish character, sacrificing the livelihood of both his sister and Stephen for his own personal gain. The bright fire – the hope, the integrity, the innocence – that lived in each of these characters in Book One has burned out by the end of Book Two, becoming nothing more than smoke and ash.