Read the following passages and answer the questions that follow: In his novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens (1812-70), perhaps the most severe contemporary critic of the horrors of industrialisation for the poor, wrote a fictional account of an industrial town he aptly called Coketown. '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. 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. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonouslyup and down, like the head of an elephant in a stare of melancholy madness. ' Q. About which period and the country he is talking about in this passage?