Mr Collins and Charlotte Lucas — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Mr Collins and Charlotte Lucas
Characters
What you need to know
How Austen presents Mr Collins and Charlotte Lucas, and how the character develops across the text: a pompous clergyman who is heir to Longbourn, and the sensible friend who marries him for security.
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: 'it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life', 'whose bounty and beneficence has preferred me to the valuable rectory of this parish', 'Mr. Collins was not a sensible man', 'a mixture of pride and obsequiousness, self-importance and humility', 'I consider the clerical office as equal in point of dignity with the highest rank in the kingdom', 'every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony in his parish', 'it is by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made you', 'my chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on entering the marriage state', 'still he would be her husband', 'When Mr. Collins could be forgotten, there was really a great air of comfort throughout'.
Mr Collins as a comic character whose speeches and letters mock themselves, and Charlotte as a clear-eyed realist the novel neither praises nor condemns.
Context: the entail that makes Mr Collins heir to Longbourn, a clergyman's living in the gift of a patron, and the prospects of an unmarried woman of twenty-seven without fortune.
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.
