Poverty and wealth — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Poverty and wealth
Themes
What you need to know
How Dickens explores poverty, wealth and inequality in Victorian London 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: 'Are there no prisons?', 'decrease the surplus population', 'a dismal little cell', 'Another idol has displaced me', 'a golden one', 'They were not a handsome family; they were not well dressed', 'This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want.', 'Not a farthing less'.
Context: the 1834 Poor Law and the workhouses, child labour, and Malthus.
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.
