Context — A Christmas Carol — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The Victorian context of A Christmas Carol: poverty in 1840s London, the Poor Law and workhouses, Malthus, child labour,
Dickens's own childhood and his campaigning, and the Victorian Christmas.
How to use this context in an answer about the novella rather than as background.
Staves, not chapters: the novella set out like a carol in five staves, linking the story to singing.
Dickens's visit in 1843 to a ragged school off Field Lane and Saffron Hill, the report on child labour presented to Parliament in early 1843, and his speech on education in Manchester in October 1843.
OCR credits context in this essay only where it is relevant to the question: social, historical and cultural ideas, or literary context such as the conventions of the Gothic or of science fiction, woven into the argument rather than written as a paragraph of background.
OCR's question on this novel is one essay, from a choice of two, for 40 marks: an extract-based question on the printed extract and the novel elsewhere, or a discursive question on a view of the novel, using at least two moments. Response (AO1) and language, form and structure (AO2) carry the most weight and equal weight, context (AO3) counts when it is relevant to the question, and 4 marks are for vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (AO4). An extract-based answer that never leaves the extract, or a discursive answer built on one moment, cannot go above Level 3. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the question it is for.
