Context — Great Expectations — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The contexts of Great Expectations: class and the Victorian idea of the gentleman, crime and punishment from the prison hulks
to transportation to Australia, the Bildungsroman, serial publication in All the Year Round, and the novel's two endings.
How to use this context in an answer about the novel rather than as background.
The gentleman in the 19th century: how the word came to mean education, manners and position rather than birth, and why Pip's wish to become one matters.
Crime and punishment: the prison hulks moored off the Kent marshes, Newgate and the public hangings outside it, and transportation to Australia, from which a convict's return was punishable by death.
The Bildungsroman, the novel of growing up, and Great Expectations as Pip's story told in three stages by his older self.
Serial publication: weekly parts in Dickens's own magazine All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861, and how this shaped the short chapters, each built round a single subject.
The two endings: the unhappy ending Dickens first wrote, the ending he wrote instead on Edward Bulwer-Lytton's advice, and the last sentence he changed for later editions.
The setting in the first half of the 19th century, a generation before Dickens wrote the novel, on the Kent marshes and in London.
Edexcel's 19th-century novel question doesn't mark context: knowing it helps you understand the novel, but exam answers spend their time on the extract's language in part (a) and on the whole novel in part (b).
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.
