Joe and Biddy — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Joe and Biddy
Characters
What you need to know
How Dickens presents Joe and Biddy, and how the character develops across the text: the loyal, forgiving blacksmith and the clever, honest village girl, whom Pip leaves behind and comes back to.
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 mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow', 'a sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness', 'my father were that good in his hart', 'if you think as Money can make compensation to me for the loss of the little child', 'You won't find half so much fault in me if you think of me in my forge dress, with my hammer in my hand', 'Ever the best of friends; ain't us, Pip?', 'Biddy was never insulting, or capricious', 'to learn everything that I learn, and always to keep up with me', 'Don't you think you are happier as you are?', 'Are you quite sure, then, that you WILL come to see him often?', 'And, dear Joe, you have the best wife in the whole world'.
Joe's dialect and Biddy's self-taught learning, and how Dickens shows that goodness does not depend on class or education.
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.
