Coketown in 2011

Charles Dickens paints a lovely picture of a typical Industrial Age town in "Coketown" but he has also shown a glimpse at a modern day metropolis as well. Dickens describes buildings that appear exactly the same as all the others, people that follow the same monotonous routine every day, and people whose lives are based mostly on fact of what is real.

Dickens describes buildings that are so similar that one can confuse the jail for the hospital. Nowadays apart from floor designs there really isn't much difference between a jail and hospital in a large city. The same square, boxed design. Occasionally you get the exception that comes from the mind of a creative architect but normally it is the same.

Then there are the people who live in a modern "Coketown." People today usually go through the same monotonous routine in a large city: get up, go to work, get through work, hate it by the end of the day, come home exhausted, repeat the next day. Thus turning people into machines like the ones they man in the factories of "Coketown." Life in such a town often turns people into the same uninterested, uninvolved dull person who believes in nothing but solid fact and has lost most of their sense of art and beauty in the world.

This is not to say that everyone in a modern city is made as such. Significant enough improvements have been made, and populations increased to such an amount that the diversity allows for the arts to develop in "Coketown" as well, which is the major difference in today's world; the arts are returning to "Coketown" and giving it that rejuvenated life that it had lost in Dickens' age.