Dunstan Cass and Molly Farren — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Dunstan Cass and Molly Farren
Characters
What you need to know
How Eliot presents Dunstan Cass and Molly Farren, and how the character develops across the text: Godfrey's spiteful brother, who steals Silas's gold and vanishes, and Godfrey's secret wife, ruined by opium, who dies in the snow.
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 spiteful jeering fellow, who seemed to enjoy his drink the more when other people went dry', 'I might tell the Squire how his handsome son was married to that nice young woman, Molly Farren', 'if Molly should happen to take a drop too much laudanum some day', 'whenever I fall, I’m warranted to fall on my legs', 'whose delight in lying, grandly independent of utility', 'Dunstan’s mind was as dull as the mind of a possible felon usually is', 'she would go in her dingy rags, with her faded face, once as handsome as the best', 'the lingering mother’s tenderness that refused to give him her hungry child', 'a barmaid’s paradise of pink ribbons and gentlemen’s jokes', 'the familiar demon in her bosom', 'Slowly the demon was working his will, and cold and weariness were his helpers', 'his unhappy hated wife', 'wedged between two great stones'.
How both are undone by their own vices, lost in fog and snow on the way to Silas's door, and how their deaths free Godfrey for a time but bring the truth out at last.
Context: laudanum and opium, cheap and widely taken in the 19th century, and the disgrace of a squire's son's marriage to a barmaid.
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.
