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Quote 4. 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. Explanation and Analysis. Here we get our first good look at Coketown, the setting for most of the novel. Dickens uses his descriptions of the town to criticize the path his country took in the 19th century. During the 19th century, Britain pursued a series of policies that transformed its towns into industrial powerhouses, devoted to producing goods at factories. Such factories made Britain immensely wealthy, but also crippled most of its population: men and women were horribly injured in factories, families lived in poverty, and the country's cities themselves were made exceptionally dirty and ugly (although Dickens describes this ugliness in a rather racist way here). Coketown, we can see, was supposed to be a beautiful brick town--i.e., industrialization was supposed to make it a utopia. Instead, factories have made it hideously ugly, a clear example of the limits of mechanization.