Parents and childhood — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Parents and childhood
Themes
What you need to know
How Dickens explores childhood and upbringing, and the parents and substitute parents who shape children, for good and ill 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: 'Tickler was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled frame', 'as if I had insisted on being born in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality', 'I'd fur rather of the two go wrong the t'other way', 'were not growing up or being brought up, but were tumbling up', 'to see my gentleman spend his money like a gentleman', 'Put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty little child out of the heap who could be saved', 'Who taught me to be hard?', 'Who praised me when I learnt my lesson?'.
Orphans and substitute parents: Mrs Joe and Joe, Miss Havisham and Estella, Magwitch and Pip, and the neglected Pocket children.
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.
