Coketown is a fictional industrial city that represents the grim realities of 19th-century industrial England. In Hard Times, Dickens uses Coketown to criticize:
Industrialization
Mechanization of human life
Poor working and living conditions
Utilitarian education and philosophy
He paints it as a place full of "interminable serpents of smoke" and buildings all made of "red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it."
