ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Charles Dickens (1812–1870) published this ‘Condition of England’ novel in 1854. His setting was a mythical place called Coketown, partly inspired by a visit to the Northern industrial town of Preston where he had observed a strike.

Detailed explanation-2: -Coketown is described as being “inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next” (27-28).

Detailed explanation-3: -Instead the story is set in the fictitious Victorian industrial Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town, in some ways similar to Manchester, though smaller. Coketown may be partially based on 19th-century Preston.

Detailed explanation-4: -Coketown is a fictitious name for the “town of coke” and it is an ugly and unpleasant place where life is hard, boring, sad and monotonous. It is highlighted by the comparison between the town and its people and it is emphasized by the repetition of words and sentence structures.

Detailed explanation-5: -The novel Hard Times was written Charles Dickens. (i)The novel Hard Times describes Coketown, a fictitious industrial town, as a grim place full of machinery, smoking chimneys, rivers polluted purple and buildings that all looked the same.