Robert Walton — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Robert Walton
Characters
What you need to know
How Shelley presents Robert Walton, and how the character develops across the text: the lonely Arctic explorer whose ambition mirrors Victor's, and who in the end turns back.
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: 'the region of beauty and delight', 'I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path', 'do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose?', 'I have no friend, Margaret', 'I bitterly feel the want of a friend', 'I shall kill no albatross', 'One man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought', 'I begin to love him as a brother', 'I have longed for a friend; I have sought one who would sympathise with and love me', 'If we are lost, my mad schemes are the cause', 'Thus are my hopes blasted by cowardice and indecision', 'I have lost my hopes of utility and glory;—I have lost my friend'.
Walton as Victor's double and the reader's stand-in, and his choice to turn back as the alternative to Victor's ending.
Form: Walton's letters to his sister Margaret, which open and close the novel and vouch for the truth of the tale.
Context: voyages of discovery to the North Pole, and Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which Walton half-jokingly invokes.
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.
