Chapter 12: The Strange Story of Jonathan Small — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
Chapter 12: The Strange Story of Jonathan Small
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Small's confession: his lost leg, the 1857 rebellion and the murder of Achmet at Agra, the bargain with Sholto and Morstan in the Andamans,
his escape with Tonga, and the ending, as Watson gains a wife, Jones the credit and Holmes the cocaine-bottle.
Key quotations: 'Where is the justice that I should give it up to those who have never earned it?', 'Twenty long years in that fever-ridden swamp', 'the great mutiny', 'In Worcestershire the life of a man seems a great and a sacred thing', 'my heart set as hard as a flint within me', 'I had now conceived the utmost horror of the man', 'I tell you that it is four or none with us', 'From that day I lived only for vengeance', 'He was stanch and true, was little Tonga', 'But love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things', 'I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?', 'there still remains the cocaine-bottle'.
Form: Small's first-person confession as a story within the story, with Watson's reactions breaking in so the reader judges him.
Context: the 1857 rebellion, the British retreat into the fort at Agra, and the penal settlement in the Andamans.
