pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in
highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it.
The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with
a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles
like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town
were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The
jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been
the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or
anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the
graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the
material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the
immaterial. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school
of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man
were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in
hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures,
or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in
the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.

A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant in its assertion, of
course got on well? Why no, not quite well. No? Dear me!

No. Coketown did not come out of its own furnaces, in all respects
like gold that had stood the fire. First, the perplexing mystery
of the place was, Who belonged to the eighteen denominations?
Because, whoever did, the labouring people did not. It was very
strange to walk through the streets on a Sunday morning, and note
how few of them the barbarous jangling of bells that was driving
the sick and nervous mad, called away from their own quarter, from
their own close rooms, from the corners of their own streets, where
they lounged listlessly, gazing at all the church and chapel going,