Context — Silas Marner — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The contexts of Silas Marner: George Eliot's life, from her Warwickshire childhood and lost faith to her pen name, rural England in the early 19th century
in wartime, when high prices favoured landowners, handloom weavers and the coming of factories, Dissenters' chapels and the Church of England, the squire and the gentry,
laudanum and opium, and Wordsworth and Eliot's realism.
How this context helps you understand the novel, and why Edexcel's novel question rewards close reading and knowledge of the text rather than context.
George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819 to 1880): her childhood on the Arbury Hall estate near Nuneaton in Warwickshire, where her father managed the estate, her turn away from her evangelical faith, her life with George Henry Lewes, and why she published under a man's name.
Silas Marner (1861), her third novel after Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, set in the early years of the 19th century 'in those war times', in a Midlands village 'aloof from the currents of industrial energy and Puritan earnestness'.
Handloom weavers and the Industrial Revolution: cloth woven by hand in homes and small workshops, then by power looms in mills, and the factory that has replaced Lantern Yard by the end of the novel.
Religion: Lantern Yard as a small chapel of Dissenters, Protestants outside the Church of England, against Raveloe's parish church, and the old practice of drawing lots to learn God's will, as the apostles did to choose Matthias.
The country squire as the chief landowner of a parish, living on rents and country sports, as Squire Cass does at the Red House.
Laudanum, opium dissolved in alcohol, cheap and widely taken in the 19th century, and Molly Farren's addiction to it; and catalepsy, the trance-like fits that make Raveloe think Silas uncanny.
The epigraph from Wordsworth's poem Michael, 'A child, more than all other gifts / That earth can offer to declining man, / Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts', and Eliot's realism, which finds value in ordinary country lives while giving the story the shape of a legend.
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.
