What is the freedom like in Coketown of Hard Times?

If there is a "freedom" in Coketown, it is definitely not composed of an ability to resist quantification on the terms of a market demand. The "legs," for example, are in a sense sexually liberated because they can and do practice libertine behavior. But this does not mean that they can somehow escape the market forces which determine their usefulness in the society.

I read Hard Times many years ago at university. What I recall is that people had very little freedom if any. If they wanted a job, they did what they were told by their superiors. One of the running themes in the book was the loss of people's individual freedom, joy and liveliness in their town. As you moved down the chain of hierarchy, freedoms became less and less. The masses who fuelled most all of Coketown had no freedoms. They worked crazy hours and suffered untold hardships. Dickens emphasized on the suffering of the working class, they worked far from where they lived; only few of them were seen on the streets on Sunday driving their boss to church because that day was not a working day. Dickens sums up the reality for most people working in Coketown like this,

"It contained several large streets all very like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another…. all went in and out around the same hours, with the same pavement, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow”