How Dickens explores redemption and the possibility of change 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: 'I wear the chain I forged in life', 'Your reclamation, then', 'I am not the man I was', 'I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year', 'as merry as a school-boy', 'knew how to keep Christmas well'.
Context: Christian ideas of repentance and redemption, and the novella as a parable.
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.
