Godfrey Cass — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Godfrey Cass
Characters
What you need to know
How Eliot presents Godfrey Cass, and how the character develops across the text: the Squire's weak, good-natured eldest son, who hides his marriage and his child, wins Nancy, and learns too late that he cannot reclaim his daughter.
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 fine open-faced good-natured young man', 'His natural irresolution and moral cowardice', 'almost as helpless as an uprooted tree', 'rather go on sitting at the feast, and sipping the wine he loved, though with the sword hanging over him', 'I’m not a scoundrel—at least, I’ll stop short somewhere', 'You’re a shilly-shally fellow', 'there was one terror in his mind at that moment: it was, that the woman might not be dead', 'some poor woman’s who has been found in the snow, I believe', 'he would do everything but own it', 'It’s been ‘I will’ and ‘I won’t’ with me all my life', 'But I’ve a claim on you, Eppie—the strongest of all claims', 'I wanted to pass for childless once, Nancy—I shall pass for childless now against my wish', 'It’s part of my punishment, Nancy, for my daughter to dislike me'.
Godfrey as Silas's foil: the father by blood who abandons his child against the father by love who keeps her.
Context: the eldest son of a squire, raised in a motherless home without discipline, with his inheritance and Nancy both at stake.
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.
