Marley's Ghost — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Marley's Ghost
Characters
What you need to know
How Dickens presents Marley's Ghost, and how the character develops across the text: his warning and the chains he forged in life.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Marley was dead: to begin with', 'dead as a door-nail', 'I wear the chain I forged in life', 'I made it link by link, and yard by yard', 'cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel', 'Mankind was my business', 'no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused', 'by Three Spirits'.
The chain as a symbol, and the ghost story as Dickens's form.
Edexcel's novel question has two parts, and neither marks context: part (a) on the printed extract marks language, form and structure (AO2); part (b) on the novel elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1), not language analysis. Use context only where it explains a reading, and say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
