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Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—Fairy Palaces:
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.
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