"The Key-Note," which is Chapter 5 of Book I of Charles Dickens's Hard Times, is full of imagery. Imagery is a collection of images in a literary work. Each sentence holds at least one image, all relating to certain ideas that Dickens is trying to comment upon. Coketown is unnatural, it is too industrialized, the town and the lives of the people who work within it are monotonous, the people lack emotion. Dickens uses colors as imagery and also metaphors. Even some of the repetition creates images in the reader's mind.

Dickens uses the color red to describe the town, "It was a town of red brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it..." Red connotes anger, evil. Dickens also uses black to describe the town, ."..if the smoke and ashes had allowed it....it was a town of unnatural black and red...