the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our
tune.

It 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. 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. It had a black canal in it, and
a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye,
and vast piles of building full of windows
where there was a rattling and a trembling
all day long, 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. 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,
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 to-morrow,
and every year the counterpart of the last and
the next.

These attributes of Coketown were in the
main inseparable from the work by which it
was sustained; against them were to be set
off, comforts of life which found their way all
over the world, and elegancies of life which
made we will not ask how much of the fine
lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place
mentioned. The rest of its features were
voluntary, and they were these.

You saw nothing in Coketown but what
was severely workful. If the members of a
religious persuasion built a chapel there—
as the members of eighteen religious
persuasions had done—they made it a pious
warehouse, of red brick, with sometimes (but
this only in highly ornamented examples) a
bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The
solitary exception was the New Church; a
stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over
the door, terminating in four short
pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All
the public inscriptions in the town were
painted alike, in severe characters of black
and white. The jail might have been the
infirmary, the infirmary might have been the
jail, the town-hall might have been either,
or both, or anything else, for anything that
appeared to the contrary in the graces of
their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere
in the material aspect of the town;
fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial.
The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and
the school of design was all fact, and the
relations between master and man were all
fact, and everything was fact between the
lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what
you couldn't state in figures, or show to be
purchasable in the cheapest market and
saleable in the dearest, was not, and never
should be, world without end, Amen.

A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant
in its assertion, of course got on well? Why
no, not quite well. No? Dear me!

No. Coketown did not come out of its
own furnaces, in all respects like gold that
had stood the fire. First, the perplexing
mystery of the place was, Who belonged to
the eighteen denominations? Because,
whoever did, the laboring people did not. It was
very strange to walk through the streets on
a Sunday morning, and note how few of them
the barbarous jangling of bells that was driving
the sick and nervous mad, called away from
their own quarter, from their own close
rooms, from the corners of their own streets,
where they lounged listlessly, gazing at all the
church and chapel going, as at a thing with
which they had no manner of concern. Nor
was it merely the stranger who noticed
this, because there was a native organization
in Coketown itself, whose members were to be
heard of in the House of Commons every session,
indignantly petitioning for acts of parliament
that should make these people religious by
main force. Then, came the Teetotal Society,
who complained that these same people would
get drunk, and showed in tabular statements
that they did get drunk, and proved at tea
parties that no inducement, human or Divine
(except a medal), would induce them to forego
their custom of getting drunk. Then, came
the chemist and druggist, with other tabular
statements, showing that when they didn't
get drunk, they took opium. Then, came the
experienced chaplain of the jail, with more
tabular statements, outdoing all the
previous tabular statements, and showing that
the same people would resort to low haunts,
hidden from the public eye, where they heard
low singing and saw low dancing, and mayhap
joined in it; and where A. B., aged twenty-
four next birthday, and committed for eighteen
months' solitary, had himself said (not that
he had ever shown himself particularly
worthy of belief) his ruin began, as he
was perfectly sure and confident that otherwise
he would have been a tip-top moral
specimen. Then, came Mr. Gradgrind and
Mr. Bounderby, the two gentlemen at this
present moment walking through Coketown,
and both eminently practical, who could,
on occasion, furnish more tabular statements
derived from their own personal
experience, and illustrated by cases they had
known and seen, from which it clearly
appeared—in short it was the only clear
thing in the case—that these same people
were a bad lot altogether, gentlemen; that
do what you would for them they were never
thankful for it, gentlemen; that they were
restless, gentlemen; that they never knew
what they wanted; that they lived upon the
best, and bought fresh butter, and insisted on
Mocha coffee, and rejected all but prime parts