Chapters 4 to 10: the stolen gold — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
Chapters 4 to 10: the stolen gold
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Dunstan sells and kills Godfrey's horse Wildfire and steals Silas's gold; Silas's discovery and his cry for help at the Rainbow inn; suspicion of a pedlar;
Godfrey's half-confession to his father; and the neighbours' kindness, from Mr Macey's advice to Dolly Winthrop's visit with her son Aaron.
Key quotations: 'So he stepped forward into the darkness', 'The sight of the empty hole made his heart leap violently', 'a wild ringing scream, the cry of desolation', 'left his soul like a forlorn traveller on an unknown desert', 'there’s allays two ’pinions', 'I’ve been robbed!', 'there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud', 'a very slight impulse suffices for that on a downward road', 'his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken', 'the kindness fell on him as sunshine falls on the wretched', 'Silas spent his Christmas-day in loneliness'.
Structure: the narrative follows Dunstan into the fog and then cuts to Silas, so the reader knows the thief while Raveloe never guesses.
The Rainbow scene: comic village talk about ghosts and Cliff's Holiday, broken off by Silas, who seems at first to be a ghost himself.
Eduqas's essay on this novel marks context as much as response and analysis: weave context into the argument, and treat the printed extract as a starting point, ranging across the beginning, middle and end of the novel.
