Word: coketown
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dickens' story takes place in Coketown, where workers spend 14 hours a day in the factories and the rest of the time in their grim hovels. The owners clothe their greed in the high-toned words of utilitarianism, the philosophy of the time: what works is good, and good is what works...
...Jaguar convertible with their younger brother Simon, 4, for the ride to their private day schools. After dropping them off, he continues driving through countryside that remains green with grazing pastures right up to the area bordering Darlaston. Like many towns in the Midlands, Darlaston resembles the fictional Coketown of Charles Dickens' Hard Times: "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...
...difference between the fiction of Coketown and the reality of Darlaston is that "you saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful." At Rubery Owen, an average workday seems more like a raucous political convention−or a cinema verite version of the 1959 Peter Sellers movie, I'm All Right, Jack. Shop stewards and managers alike frequently spend half of their day on labor disputes, but because the men do not actually leave the plant, these countless lost hours are not even logged among the 70,000 man-days the company now loses a year...
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