The novel introduces Josiah Bounderby with striking imagery:
A big, loud man, with a stare and a metallic laugh. A man made out of coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him. A man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes open, and lift his eyebrows up. A man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start.
In this intensely visual description of Josiah Bounderby, Dickens depicts him as being full to the point of bursting (“puffed head,” “swelled veins,” “strained skin”). He is compared to a balloon ready to pop. In other words, Josiah Bounderby is literally full of hot air, as if his physical appearance were a manifestation of the baseless pomp and blustering talk that keeps him afloat in Coketown.
He is said to be made of “coarse material,” as if made of cheap cloth that has been “stretched to make so much of him.” This comparison points to a lack of generosity, or a kind of meanness in Josiah’s character. There is even less to him, it appears from this description, than meets the eye. He is the embodiment of vulgarity and spiritual deprivation; even his laugh is “metallic,” cold and grinding.
This is one example of Dickens’s vivid, visual character descriptions, which are peppered throughout the book, and one of his trademarks as a writer. They are often written in such a way as to make physical the spiritual, emotional, or intellectual traits of his characters.
The book depicts Coketown on a typical workday using imagery that almost border on the fantastic:
The fairy palaces burst into illumination, before pale morning showed the monstrous serpents of smoke trailing themselves over Coketown. A clattering of clogs upon the pavement; a rapid ringing of bells; and the melancholy-mad elephants, polished and oiled up for the day’s monotony, were at their heavy exercise again.
The imagery is both visual (“burst into illumination”) and auditory (“rapid ringing of bells”), and creates a sense of scale and strangeness.
In this chapter, the reader is made aware that hundreds of people work at this factory. The size of the operation is captured in compact, effective imagery of the intense “clattering” of workers' clogs across the street in the morning, as well as the depiction of the factory itself as a “palace,” a huge, elaborate structure. The scale of operations is also indicated by the amount of pollution visible throughout the town (“monstrous serpents of smoke”).
The choice to describe a Victorian factory as a “fairy” palace, a fanciful, mythical place, lends a sense of unreality to the scene. Likewise the characterization of the machines within the factories as “melancholy-mad elephants” is strangely story-book-like.
While the factory and business owners of the town think of a worldview guided by rational self-interest and dominated by capitalist principles and interests as inherently “factual,” Dickens reveals through his choice of imagery just how fantastic the order of things actually is. There is nothing natural or factual about “serpents” that float menacingly over the roads, or “mad elephants” trumpeting through the streets. The miserable working conditions, unsupportable scale of production, and mechanization of human workers are equally unnatural in Dickens’s worldview. Bounderby’s vision for the town, he seems to suggest, is a farce.
