Money and wealth — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Money and wealth
Themes
What you need to know
How Eliot explores money and what people value, from Silas's hoard of gold to Eppie, the treasure that replaces it, and the Casses' debts and wealth across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'five bright guineas put into his hand', 'mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good', 'He began to think it was conscious of him, as his loom was', 'He handled them, he counted them, till their form and colour were like the satisfaction of a thirst to him', 'hoarding was common in country districts in those days', 'He spread them out in heaps and bathed his hands in them', 'as if they had been unborn children', 'Two hundred and seventy-two pounds, twelve and sixpence', 'the money as comes i’ that way ’ull be a bad bed to lie down on at the last', 'Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must be worshipped in close-locked solitude', 'The gold had kept his thoughts in an ever-repeated circle, leading to nothing beyond itself', 'the recovered gold—the old long-loved gold', 'I don’t know what it is to gentlefolks, but I look upon it as a deal—almost too much'.
Symbol: the gold and Eppie's golden hair, and the treasure Silas finds on his hearth.
The Casses' debts, rents and the price of Wildfire, against how little Silas and Eppie want at the end.
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.
