Dickens Use Of Hyperbole In Tellson's Bank

Dickens satirizes the state of England in the way that the country refused to adapt and improve as though that increased its respectability. Dickens uses irony and hyperbole to emphasize this criticism, using Tellson’s Bank as a representation of England. As an illustration, Dickens utilizes irony when he writes, “the partners in the House were...proud of its ugliness, proud of its incommodiousness...an active weapon which they flashed at more convenient places of business”. Tellson’s Bank is a representation of the state of England and how it chooses not to improve when others did. Dickens uses the irony that England is proud of a poor quality and uses it to prove its superiority in order to ridicule England’s flaw that it is backwards in its support of inconvenience and distastefulness. Dickens utilizes irony again …show more content…
Dickens describes the horrid conditions of both countries to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that the two countries were not all that different, that the Revolution could have just as well have happened in England as it had in France. Dickens likely wanted to criticize the view the English must have had on the French Revolution that they were savages and barbarians and the English would never have done such a thing. He shows this criticism when he compares Tellson’s Bank to the state of England, which “[disinherited] its sons for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly objectionable” as a stab at the monarchy that the English retained while the French had tried to object. With his combined use of hyperbole and irony, Dickens points out the absurdity that English is proud of being stuck in its ways as though that is respectable in comparison to the radical change that occurred in