How does Charles Dicken’s use language to present the harm of industrialization through description of Coketown in ‘Hard Times’?

Coketown is a fictional industrial city in Charles Dicken’s novel, Hard Times. He wrote it as a protest against industrialization, which he considered harmful to nature and to the human spirit and imagination. To evoke the feelings of fear in his readers, Dickens uses similes to compare the colours of the city to ‘the painted face of a savage,’ and the movement of the machines to a great ‘elephant in a state of melancholy madness,’ and smoke turns into ‘interminable serpents’ through metaphor. The people are stripped of their personality as they go ‘in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work.’ This repetition produces the image of an ant colony, and amplifies the idea that industry caused individuals to blend into a faceless mass.

The motif of animals in this paragraph is ironic, as they are used to describe something man-made. This contrast between nature and machines is used to evoke repulsiveness at the city and its effect on nature and people living in it.