Social class and the gentleman — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Social class and the gentleman
Themes
What you need to know
How Dickens explores social class, snobbery, money and what makes a true gentleman 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: 'He's a gentleman, if you please, this villain', 'that I was a common labouring-boy; that my hands were coarse; that my boots were thick', 'I had believed in the forge as the glowing road to manhood and independence', 'while you cannot possibly be genteel and bake, you may be as genteel as never was and brew', 'no man who was not a true gentleman at heart, ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner', 'Don't know yah!', 'I'll make that boy a gentleman!', 'what a gentleman Compeyson looked', 'what a common sort of a wretch I looked'.
Context: how the word gentleman came to mean education, manners and position rather than birth during the 19th century.
Money and where it comes from: a brewer's fortune, a convict's earnings, and Pip's debts.
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.
