Context — Jekyll and Hyde — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The Victorian context of Jekyll and Hyde: respectability and reputation among gentlemen, Darwin and fears of degeneration,
science and religion, Stevenson's Edinburgh and Deacon Brodie, late-Victorian London, and the Gothic.
How to use this context in an answer about the novella rather than as background.
Victorian respectability: gentlemen, reputation and hidden vice, and the professional men of the novella.
Darwin's On the Origin of Species and fears of degeneration, and Hyde's 'ape-like' violence.
Stevenson's Edinburgh, Deacon Brodie's double life, and Stevenson's Calvinist upbringing.
Science and religion in the 1880s, and the Gothic novella or 'shilling shocker'.
Edexcel's 19th-century novel question doesn't mark context: knowing it helps you understand the novel, but exam answers spend their time on the extract's language in part (a) and on the whole novel in part (b).
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.
