What is the significance of Coketown in the novel Hard Times?

We are introduced properly to Coketown, the major setting of
this excellent Dickensian novel, in Chapter 5 of Book the First. It is described in a way that
forces us to see the link between Mr. Gradgrind's educational and utilitarian philosophy and
Bounderby's approach to work, as it is a "triumph of fact":

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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 buildings 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.

Note how the simile, "like
the painted face of a savage," introduces Coketown as a brutal, uncompromising and fearful place.
It is a town defined by its work and industrialisation, emphasises by the "interminable serpents"
that endlessly coil upwards and also the monotonous nature of that work that is necessary to keep
the fortunes of characters like Mr. Bounderby increasing.

Coketown
is therefore essential as a setting epitomising the negative aspects of industrialisation and the
mechanisation of the human soul. The description of Coketown makes it clear that it is not a
place of enjoyment or pleasure or nature - rather, the only thing it encourages is dull,
repetitive and endless labour. Dickens wrote this novel as a protest against industrialisation
and how it was in danger of turning humans into machines and denying their creativity and
imagination. Coketown, then, is his creation showing this transformation in process. Note how the
reference to the workers as "Hands" reinforces this - they are named only for the work they are
able to do, and have no individuality.