Redemption and forgiveness — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Redemption and forgiveness
Themes
What you need to know
How Dickens explores guilt, repentance, forgiveness and moral growth, and what Pip learns about what really matters 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: 'If you can ever write under my name', 'I can do it now', 'I only saw a man who had meant to be my benefactor, and who had felt affectionately, gratefully, and generously, towards me with great constancy through a series of years', 'Joe had paid it, and the receipt was in his name', 'God knows as I forgive you, if I have anythink to forgive!', 'pray tell me, both, that you forgive me!', 'tell me we are friends'.
Context: Pip's moral regeneration, and Christian ideas of repentance and forgiveness.
Miss Havisham's repentance, Magwitch's death, and Pip's return to Joe and Biddy as the lessons he learns about what matters.
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.
