Chapters 1 to 3: Silas and the Cass brothers — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Chapters 1 to 3: Silas and the Cass brothers
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Silas at his loom near Raveloe and how the village sees him; his past in Lantern Yard, where his friend William Dane framed him for theft and the drawing of lots
found him guilty; fifteen years of weaving and hoarding gold; and Squire Cass's sons, Godfrey, secretly married to Molly Farren, and Dunstan, who blackmails him.
What the opening chapters establish about character and theme, with key quotations.
Key quotations: 'the remnants of a disinherited race', 'the eccentric habits which belong to a state of loneliness', 'a dead man come to life again', 'God will clear me', 'The lots declared that Silas Marner was guilty', 'there is no just God that governs the earth righteously, but a God of lies, that bears witness against the innocent', 'the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect', 'He hated the thought of the past', 'propped the ruin in its old place for a memorial', 'He loved the guineas best', 'a spiteful jeering fellow', 'like demons who had found in him a ready-garnished home'.
Structure: the narrator moves from the village's view of Silas to his hidden history, then turns to the Red House, setting up the two stories the novel weaves together.
Context: a closed Dissenting chapel in a northern town, against Raveloe's easy church-going, farming and feasting.
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.
