Writer's methods — Great Expectations — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Writer's methods
Writer's methods
What you need to know
How Dickens's form, structure and language create meaning: the first-person narrator looking back, the three stages and the serial's weekly parts,
Gothic settings and symbols, caricature and comedy, dialect, and doubles and foils.
First-person narration looking back: the older Pip judging his younger self with irony, regret and hindsight.
Structure: three stages of Pip's expectations, short chapters written for weekly parts, a secret kept until Magwitch's return, and the revised ending.
Setting and symbol: the marshes and mists, Satis House and its stopped clocks, the wedding cake, fire, hands, and the irons and chains of crime.
Characterisation: caricature and comic names (Pumblechook, Wopsle), dialect for Joe and Magwitch, and doubles and foils such as Orlick, Drummle and Herbert.
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.
