How Wells presents The curate, and how the character develops across the text: the frightened clergyman from Weybridge whose faith collapses into panic, selfishness and madness while he is trapped with the narrator, until the narrator strikes him down.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'His face was a fair weakness, his chin retreated', 'What do these things mean?', 'Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done?', 'As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah!', 'The church! We rebuilt it only three years ago', 'The smoke of her burning goeth up for ever and ever!', 'This must be the beginning of the end', 'How can God’s ministers be killed?', 'We are safe here', 'this spoiled child of life thought his weak tears in some way efficacious', 'who face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves', 'There was poverty, sorrow; the poor were trodden in the dust, and I held my peace', 'I preached acceptable folly', 'I must bear my witness!'.
The curate as the narrator's foil: helpless exclamation, greed and despair against the narrator's watchfulness and will to survive.
Context: the curate as one of God's ministers, whose church and Sunday schools the invasion sweeps away.
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.
