Seen from a distance on a sunny
midsummer day, Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of its own, which appeared
impervious to the sun’s rays. Coketown was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it. 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. A blur of soot and smoke, Coketown in the
distance was suggestive of itself, though not a brick of it could be seen. 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 time, obedient to the call of the foundries and the factories, where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. The
streets were hot and dusty and the whole town seemed to be frying in oil.
Sun-blinds and sprinklings of water, a little cooled the main streets and the
shops; but the mills, and the courts and alleys, baked at a fierce heat.
Walking
up from the station, with his carpet bag under his arm, Mr. Headstone was
obliged to remove his jacket under the staring eye of the sun, and to wipe his
brow with a dirty green handkerchief he kept secured under his hatband for that purpose.
He was directed to the Bank by a stoker with a coal-blackened face, who, being a working man who earned a working man's wage, knew of
the institution by reputation only. It was a red brick house, with black
outside shutters, green inside blinds, a black street-door up two white steps,
a brazen door-plate, and a brazen door-handle, which burned with the afternoon's collected
heat when Mr. Headstone clasped it. At that very
moment an upper window was thrown open and the head of a prudent-looking young
man thrust itself over the parapet and gave notice that office hours were over
for the day, and that the gentleman should call again on the morrow, not before
ten o’clock, at which time office hours would commence. Before Mr. Headstone
could reply, the head was withdrawn and the window closed, and the pedagogue
was left to broil on the doorstep.
