How Priestley presents Mrs Birling, and how the character develops across the text: class prejudice and refusal to change.
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: 'a rather cold woman and her husband's social superior', 'Arthur, you're not supposed to say such things', 'Girls of that class', 'As if a girl of that sort would ever refuse money!', 'Go and look for the father of the child. It's his responsibility.', 'I don't believe it. I won't believe it', 'In the morning they'll be as amused as we are'.
Her charity work and its prejudice, and dramatic irony as she condemns Eric.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
