Tuesday, September 29, 2015

How has the river in Charles Dickens' "Hard Times" been polluted?

In Charles Dickens' "Hard Times," Coketown is portrayed as a sort of industrial nightmare area.  The book is written in the context of an England where a new, industrialized society is taking the place of the old agrarian one.


The river that runs through Coketown (along with a "black canal") has suffered from industrialization just as the people have.  It runs purple with some sort of "ill-smelling dye" that is part of the industrial waste.


Dickens uses the landscape of Coketown and his descriptions of its people as a critique of the new society that has developed in England.

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