Extract Explorer: The Novel

Extract Explorer: The Novel

The 19th-century novel question is worth 30 marks, and it has the same shape as the Shakespeare question: a short printed extract, analysed closely, and then the whole novel. • The extract is marked closely, so mine it for detail before you go anywhere. • Then range across the whole novel using memorised quotations, because this is closed book too. • Treat the two as one argument. The extract is a springboard, not a separate task. Two differences from Section A are worth knowing. There are no marks here for spelling and punctuation (those four sit on the Shakespeare question), and you are analysing prose methods rather than dramatic ones. We will work on A Christmas Carol, but the method fits any set novel.

Prose, not drama

You are analysing a 19th-century novel rather than a play. Which of these is a method you could actually write about?

• Narrative voice: whose perspective the story is told from, and what that perspective hides
• A soliloquy, in which a character alone on stage voices their thoughts
• A stage direction telling the actors where to move
• An aside spoken to the audience that the other characters cannot hear

The prose toolkit

The three AOs are the same as ever: AO1 an evidenced argument, AO2 methods, AO3 context. What changes for a novel is the methods themselves:

Match each method to its example

Meet Scrooge

This is how Dickens introduces Scrooge in Stave 1. Tap the piled-up LIST of harsh words, rather than either of the two similes.

• Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge!
• a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!
• Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire;
• secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.

Never stop at naming

Naming a method earns almost nothing on its own. "Dickens uses a simile" is a label; the marks are in what the simile does to a reader. Take the flint. Comparing Scrooge to a stone that no steel could strike a spark from makes his hardness feel mineral: not a bad mood he might come out of, but a material property. The reader is being told, before any ghost arrives, that ordinary warmth will not reach him. So every time you name a method, finish the sentence: so that the reader... If you cannot finish it, you have spotted a technique rather than analysed one.

Why the pile-up?

Dickens introduces Scrooge with a long list: "squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching". What is the effect on the reader?

• The words accumulate until his greed feels total, with no gap in it anywhere
• It lists the things Scrooge spends his time doing
• It compares Scrooge to a series of objects, one after another
• It shows that Scrooge has a complicated and varied personality

Across the five staves

Ranging across the whole novel means knowing its shape. Put these moments into the order Dickens gives them.

• Scrooge sends the charity collectors away, asking whether the prisons and workhouses are still open
• The Ghost of Christmas Past shows him Fezziwig's party, and Belle leaving him
• The Ghost of Christmas Present shows him the Cratchits' dinner and Tiny Tim
• The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him his own neglected grave
• Scrooge sends the prize turkey to the Cratchits and raises Bob's salary

The world it was written into

Dickens published *A Christmas Carol* in 1843, and he wrote it angry. He had been reading government reports on child labour, and he wanted the book to do something about it. The law he was writing against was the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. It abolished most relief for the poor outside the workhouse, and made the workhouse deliberately harsh so that only the desperate would enter. Behind it sat an idea Dickens detested: that poverty is a personal failing rather than a condition a society produces. Those are the facts. What you do with them is the next two steps, and it is where the marks are.

Woven or bolted on?

Here is the move that separates a grade 6 from a grade 9 on a 19th-century novel. Both answers below "include context". Only one of them is doing anything with it:

Context, woven in

AO3 scores best when context is woven into character analysis. Which sentence does that?

• Scrooge's cold dismissal of the poor reflects the attitudes the 1834 Poor Law made respectable, so that a reader in 1843 hears their own excuses coming out of his mouth
• In Victorian times, there were workhouses for the poor. Anyway, Scrooge is a mean character
• Charles Dickens was a very famous novelist who wrote many books about Victorian society
• The novella is divided into five staves rather than chapters

Build the sentence

Scrooge asks the charity collectors whether the prisons and the _____ are still in operation. Published in _____, the novella puts that question into the mouth of its coldest character so that readers hear their own attitudes to the poor and _____ them. Used this way the context is _____ into the point about Scrooge, rather than parked in a paragraph of its own.

Plan the answer

Exam practice. In about 60 words, PLAN a response to: "How does Dickens present Scrooge as a cold, isolated figure in the extract and the novel as a whole?" Include:

• one point about the EXTRACT, with a short quotation and its method (AO1/AO2)
• one point ranging across the WHOLE novel (how Scrooge changes across the staves)
• one context point WOVEN into your analysis of Scrooge, not bolted on

Chapter closed

The 19th-century novel question is worth _____ marks and, unlike the Shakespeare question, carries no marks for spelling and punctuation. Analyse the extract's _____ methods, such as narrative voice, imagery, listing and structure, and always say what they do to a reader. Then range across the _____ novel from memory. Context earns most when it is _____ into your analysis of a character.