How Dickens presents Pip, and how the character develops across the text: an orphan's journey from the forge to London and back, from shame and snobbery to gratitude and loyalty.
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: 'my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip', 'I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before', 'Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister's temper. But, Joe had sanctified it', 'I wanted to make Joe less ignorant and common, that he might be worthier of my society', 'I am disgusted with my calling and with my life', 'If I could have kept him away by paying money, I certainly would have paid money', 'I lived in a state of chronic uneasiness respecting my behaviour to Joe', 'hanged at the Old Bailey door, that I had deserted Joe', 'I only saw in him a much better man than I had been to Joe', 'God bless this gentle Christian man!'.
Structure: the older Pip as narrator, judging the snobbery of his younger self.
Context: the Bildungsroman, the novel of a young person's growth into adulthood.
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.
