Dolly Winthrop — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Dolly Winthrop
Characters
What you need to know
How Eliot presents Dolly Winthrop, and how the character develops across the text: the wheelwright's patient, kindly wife whose simple faith and practical help draw Silas back into village life and the church.
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: 'a very mild, patient woman', 'She was a “comfortable woman”', 'if there’s any good, we’ve need of it i’ this world', 'you could put your trust i’ Them as knows better nor we do', 'her simple Raveloe theology', 'it’s like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest', 'you must bring her up like christened folks’s children', 'Them above has got a deal tenderer heart nor what I’ve got', 'all as we’ve got to do is to trusten, Master Marner', 'if you could but ha’ gone on trustening, Master Marner, you wouldn’t ha’ run away from your fellow-creaturs and been so lone', 'there’s some things as I’ve never felt i’ the dark about', 'that doesn’t hinder there being a rights'.
Dolly's dialect and her name for God, 'Them', as Eliot's picture of a simple, generous faith.
Dolly as Eppie's godmother and Aaron's mother, the link between Silas's cottage and the village.
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.
