Jaggers and Wemmick — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Jaggers and Wemmick
Characters
What you need to know
How Dickens presents Jaggers and Wemmick, and how the character develops across the text: the powerful criminal lawyer who trusts only evidence, and his clerk who keeps the office and his home apart.
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: 'a post-office of a mouth', 'Get hold of portable property', 'you'll see a wild beast tamed', 'the office is one thing, and private life is another', 'he washed his clients off, as if he were a surgeon or a dentist', 'I like that Spider though', 'Wemmick walked among the prisoners much as a gardener might walk among his plants', 'Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence', 'I'll have no feelings here', 'Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil'.
Context: Newgate Prison and the Old Bailey courts where Jaggers works.
Jaggers's power over his clients, and Wemmick's two lives in Little Britain and at the Castle in Walworth.
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.
