Mr Jones and the farmers — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Mr Jones and the farmers
Characters
What you need to know
How Orwell presents Mr Jones and the farmers, and how the character develops across the text: Jones, Pilkington, Frederick and Whymper, the humans the pigs first overthrow and then come to resemble.
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: 'too drunk to remember to shut the popholes', 'although a hard master, had been a capable farmer, but of late he had fallen on evil days', 'had taken to drinking more than was good for him', 'an easy-going gentleman farmer who spent most of his time in fishing or hunting', 'a tough, shrewd man, perpetually involved in lawsuits and with a name for driving hard bargains', 'a sly-looking little man with side whiskers', 'the sight of Napoleon, on all fours, delivering orders to Whymper, who stood on two legs', 'Serves you right.', 'he had died in an inebriates' home in another part of the county', 'Between pigs and human beings there was not, and there need not be, any clash of interests whatever.', 'Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington had each played an ace of spades simultaneously'.
The humans as a frame: Jones's neglect at the start, the farmers' fear and gossip, Whymper as go-between, and the dinner at the end.
Context: Jones as Tsar Nicholas II, overthrown in 1917, and the final dinner and quarrel as the Tehran Conference of 1943, a friendship between the Soviet Union and the West that Orwell did not expect to last.
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.
