Empire and race — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
Empire and race
Themes
What you need to know
How Conan Doyle explores the British Empire in India and the Andamans, and the attitudes to race the novel shows across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'It was a fight of the millions against the hundreds', 'We only ask you to do that which your countrymen come to this land for. We ask you to be rich', 'the Sikh knows the Englishman, and the Englishman knows the Sikh', 'they are in with me, and we all go together', 'the smallest race upon this earth', 'the unhallowed dwarf with his hideous face', 'No man ever had a more faithful mate', 'exhibiting poor Tonga at fairs'.
Context: the 1857 rebellion, the Andaman penal settlement, and the racial stereotypes of Victorian Britain, which the lesson explains and questions rather than repeats.
How Small's loyalty to the Four and to Tonga sits beside the racist language of Watson, the gazetteer and Small himself.
