Social responsibility — A Christmas Carol — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Social responsibility
Themes
What you need to know
How Dickens explores social responsibility and how society should treat the poor 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: 'Are there no prisons?', 'Mankind was my business', 'The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune', 'Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die?', 'This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want.', 'most of all beware this boy', 'fellow-passengers to the grave', 'a second father'.
Context: Malthus, the 1834 Poor Law and the workhouses, Ragged Schools, and Dickens's own childhood in a blacking factory.
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.
