Chapters 1 and 2 — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Chapters 1 and 2
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Old Major's speech and dream, Beasts of England, the pigs' teaching of Animalism, the Rebellion and Jones's expulsion,
the Seven Commandments and the missing milk.
What each chapter establishes about character and theme, with key quotations.
Key quotations: 'our lives are miserable, laborious, and short', 'No animal in England is free', 'Man is the only creature that consumes without producing', 'All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.', 'Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, / Beasts of every land and clime', 'the golden future time', 'a complete system of thought', 'Will there still be sugar after the Rebellion?', 'a mysterious country called Sugarcandy Mountain', 'they flung themselves upon their tormentors', 'Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy', 'All animals are equal', 'Never mind the milk, comrades!', 'it was noticed that the milk had disappeared'.
Structure: the novella opens with a speech and a song, and the Commandments painted on the barn wall become the record of every later change.
Context: Old Major's speech and the Rebellion as the ideas of Marx and Lenin and the revolution of 1917.
For Edexcel's essay on this text, link each point to its context and the writer's purpose, which earn as many marks as knowledge of the text (16 of 40); language analysis earns no marks there.
