Crime, guilt and justice — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Crime, guilt and justice
Themes
What you need to know
How Dickens explores crime, punishment, guilt and the law, from the hulks on the marshes to Newgate and the courts 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: 'Or I'll have your heart and liver out', 'I was in mortal terror of the young man who wanted my heart and liver', 'Now, the Hulks has got its gentleman again, through me', 'I was at first disposed to believe that I must have had some hand in the attack upon my sister', 'two dreadful casts', 'in thinking how strange it was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime', 'You was always in Old Orlick's way since ever you was a child', 'two-and-thirty men and women', 'the greater Judgment that knoweth all things, and cannot err'.
Context: the prison hulks, Newgate and its gallows, and transportation to Australia, with death as the penalty for returning.
Pip's guilt from childhood onwards, and Orlick as Pip's dark double, who blames Pip for the attack on Mrs Joe.
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.
