Charles Dickens

Coketown
By Charles Dickens

Dickens is using figures of speech to make pictures in the readers head and he is therefore helping people imagine the things he is telling about. One would say that Dickens is using metaphors to put a picture on his story and to make everyone feels how awful and terrible Coketown is. “Coketown 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.” He also uses the same word again and again to make his negative impression of the factory clear. “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 (…)”. After reading the story you almost smell the smoke and see the clouds of smoke in front of you. “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.” When you have read that description of the smoke you can feel it everywhere around you like a snake sneaking around because of the metaphor Dickens is making. Another metaphor you can find is when Dickens has to describe the steam-engine. He does that by using a huge animal like an elephant to make people imagine how enormous the engine is. “(…) 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” Finally you can conclude that Dickens uses a lot of metaphors and figures of speech to make the reader fells how it is being in