Civilisation and the breakdown of order — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Civilisation and the breakdown of order
Themes
What you need to know
How Wells explores how quickly civilisation, law and order collapse under attack, from the everyday habits of Woking to the panic, looting and violence of the exodus 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 dovetailing of the commonplace habits of our social order with the first beginnings of the series of events that was to topple that social order headlong', 'the daily routine of working, eating, drinking, sleeping, went on as it had done for countless years', 'I was explainin’ these is vallyble', 'sufficiently sabbatical to have assumed their best clothes', 'the disintegrating organism of government', 'the policemen who had been sent to direct the traffic, exhausted and infuriated, were breaking the heads of the people they were called out to protect', 'He was a lucky man to have friends', 'he flung himself, with both hands open, upon the heap of coins', 'the Chief Justice', 'As they grew hungry the rights of property ceased to be regarded', 'calling itself the Committee of Public Supply', 'There won’t be any more blessed concerts for a million years or so', 'all those damn little clerks that used to live down that way', 'leaderless, lawless, foodless, like sheep without a shepherd'.
Class in the crisis: the Chief Justice dying by the road, the clerks the artilleryman despises, and gentlefolk and East End factory girls thrown together on the same road north.
Context: fin de siècle fears that civilisation was decaying, and the faith in progress behind the narrator's own unfinished essay on moral ideas.
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.
