Ambition and self-improvement — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Ambition and self-improvement
Themes
What you need to know
How Dickens explores ambition, education and self-improvement, and the cost of Pip's expectations 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 struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush', 'That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me', 'I continued at heart to hate my trade and to be ashamed of home', 'Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over?', 'that he will come into a handsome property', 'We were always more or less miserable', 'how the ship in which I had sailed was gone to pieces', 'Evidently Biddy had taught Joe to write', 'I sold all I had', 'We were not in a grand way of business, but we had a good name, and worked for our profits, and did very well'.
Context: the Bildungsroman, and Pip's growth measured by what he learns rather than what he gains.
Education in the novel: Pip learning to read with Biddy's help, and Joe learning to write while Pip is in London.
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.
