It had a black canal in it and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye. (30).
Associating Coketown with "the painted face of a savage" implies that the growing urbanization is in reality the opposite of what it claims to be; rather than modern and civilized, it is harsh and barbaric. .
With this symbolic painting, the individualistic features of a man become hidden; he no longer displays his own traits, but wears a mask identical to that of thousand others of his tribe. Likewise, the workers of Coketown succumbed to the ever increasing level of uniformity:.
It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counter part of the last and the next. (31).
The heavy stress on and repetition of the word "same" allow little room to interpret the actions of these people as distinct; not one component of the city is singular, rather all repetitive and monotonous. Also with the presentation of the terms "equally" and "every", Dickens leaves little doubt that Coketown's inhabitants cannot be seen as more than the products they became so apt at producing - common, plentiful, and easily replaced. The description gives no indication that life ever existed before this tedium, nor will it ever have the possibility to change ("same as yesterday and tomorrow"). .
The melancholy environment lends to little variation in the scene. A church would not differ on the exterior from the rest of the brick facades - "If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there they made is a pious warehouse of red brick" - allowing even their most sacred of beliefs become engulfed by the standardization process (31).
