Context — Great Expectations — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The contexts of Great Expectations: class and the Victorian idea of the gentleman, crime and punishment from the prison hulks
to transportation to Australia, the Bildungsroman, serial publication in All the Year Round, and the novel's two endings.
How to use this context in an answer about the novel rather than as background.
The gentleman in the 19th century: a rank once owed to birth that new wealth, some professions and above all an elite education came to claim, with a moral side of conduct as well, and why Pip's wish to become one matters.
Crime and punishment: the prison hulks moored off the marshes, Newgate and the public hangings outside it, and transportation to Australia, from which a convict's return was punishable by death.
The Bildungsroman, the novel of growing up, and Great Expectations as Pip's story told in three stages by his older self.
Serial publication: weekly parts of one or two short chapters in Dickens's own magazine All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861, with endings that left readers eager for the next part.
The two endings: the unhappy ending Dickens first wrote, the ending he wrote instead on his friend Bulwer Lytton's advice, and the last sentence he changed for later editions.
The settings: the marsh country by the Thames where Pip grows up within sight of the prison hulks, and London, both seen through the older Pip looking back.
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.
