Parents and children — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Parents and children
Themes
What you need to know
How Eliot explores parents and children, and whether a father is made by blood or by love, from the motherless Red House to Silas's cottage 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: 'the Red House was without that presence of the wife and mother which is the fountain of wholesome love and fear', 'his father’s indulgence had not been kindness', 'I’ve been too good a father to you all', 'the incompatible demands of love', 'Eppie was reared without punishment', 'Could this be his little sister come back to him', 'My mother’s name was Hephzibah', 'who loved her better than any real fathers in the village seemed to love their daughters', 'a drawer filled with the neat work of her hands, all unworn and untouched', 'To adopt a child, because children of your own had been denied you, was to try and choose your lot in spite of Providence', 'deep affections can hardly go along with callous palms and scant means', 'It’s me she’s been calling her father ever since she could say the word'.
Three kinds of parent: the Squire who indulges his sons, Godfrey who disowns his daughter, and Silas who raises a child not his own; and Dolly, a mother to Eppie too.
Context: adoption, rare and distrusted at the time, and a birth father's claim on his child.
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.
