"So strange to turn from the chimneys to the birds. So strange to have the road-dust on his feet instead of the coal-grit. So strange to have lived to his time of life, and yet to be beginning like a boy this summer morning" (162).
Dickens uses the repetition of the phrase "so strange" to show that Stephen has hardly experienced anything working as a Hand. Coketown is such a dismal place and now that Stephen is leaving he is able to appreciate the finer things in life. This pleasantness is bizarre to him because he has never had the opportunity to enjoy himself working in the factory.
Megan Bogolia
"He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away" (10).
Dickens uses a perfectly crafted metaphor here to describe how the school system of Coketown works. The teachers stimulate the minds of young children (just as Luigi Galvani stimulated animals with electric currents) with facts, facts, facts in an effort to eradicate any sort of imagination. The imaginations of children are described as "tender" because the teacher easily stamp them out with their strict regiment of facts and figures.
Megan Bogolia
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