Social class — Silas Marner — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Social class
Themes
What you need to know
How Eliot explores class and rank, from Squire Cass and the gentry of the Red House to the villagers at the Rainbow and Eppie's choice to stay among working people 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 greatest man in Raveloe was Squire Cass', 'the poor thought that the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly life', 'the parlour on the left being reserved for the more select society', 'the sweet flower of courtesy is not a growth of such homes as the Red House', 'these rich country people ... should be brought up in utter ignorance and vulgarity', 'Was it not an appropriate thing for people in a higher station to take a charge off the hands of a man in a lower?', 'always ill at ease when he was being spoken to by “betters,”', 'make a lady of her', 'she may marry some low working-man', 'the privileges of “respectability,”', 'the poor who are born poor', 'I wasn’t brought up to be a lady, and I can’t turn my mind to it', 'the humbler part of the village'.
Context: the country squire and the landed gentry, living on rents, and the farmers, tradesmen and labourers below them.
How the narrator treats both the gentry's pride and the villagers' talk with gentle irony.
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.
