Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of its own, which appeared impervious to the sun’s rays. You only knew the town was there because you knew there could have been no such sulky blotch upon the prospect without a town. A blur of soot and smoke, now confusedly tending this way, now 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: a dense formless jumble, with sheets of cross light in it, that showed nothing but masses of darkness—Coketown in the distance was suggestive of itself, though not a brick of it could be seen.
Like many other descriptions of Coketown,
this passage, from Book the Second, Chapter 1, emphasizes
its somber smokiness. The murky soot that fills the air represents
the moral filth that permeates the manufacturing town. Similarly,
the sun’s rays represent both the physical and moral beauty that
Coketown lacks. While the pollution from the factories makes Coketown
literally a dark, dirty place to live, the suffering of its poor
and the cold self-interest of its rich inhabitants render Coketown
figuratively dark. In stating that Coketown’s appearance on the
horizon is “suggestive of itself,” the narrator implies that Coketown
is exactly what it appears to be. The dark “sulky blotch” hides
no secrets but simply represents what is, on closer inspection,
a dark, formless town. Built entirely of hard, red brick, Coketown
has no redeeming beauty or mystery—instead, it embodies Mr. Gradgrind’s
predilection for unaccommodating material reality.