GCSE English: Reading 19th-Century Fiction Extracts
The DfE subject content for GCSE English Language requires unseen reading from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, and some boards place 19th-century fiction at the centre of an exam paper – Pearson Edexcel, for example, sets a 19th-century fiction extract in Paper 1. For many students this is the hardest reading on the course: long sentences built from several clauses, semicolons and dashes, unfamiliar vocabulary and a world of factories, servants and parlours. This material gives you practice on the real thing.
Every question is built on an extract quoted word for word from a novel now in the public domain: Dickens's Coketown in Hard Times, Miss Havisham and the marsh churchyard in Great Expectations, the opening of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Margaret Hale's arrival in the industrial town of Milton in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, and the neglected door in Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. A short line before each extract tells you who is speaking and where the scene takes place, as an exam paper would.
The questions follow the reading skills in the assessment objectives: retrieving a detail that is stated in the text; inferring a character's situation or feelings; analysing the effect of words, imagery, repetition and sentence forms; explaining how a passage is structured to move the reader's focus; and evaluating a critical statement about a text. You also practise reading strategies for older prose – finding the main clause of a long sentence, working out the meaning of words such as 'chidings' from context and using social context (industrial towns, the position of a dependent child) to explain rather than replace your analysis. A further Hardy extract, from Far from the Madding Crowd, appears in the written work.
The material offers a quiz, flashcards on the key terms (retrospective narrator, pathetic fallacy, foreshadowing, semantic field and more), a written work sheet with longer language, structure and evaluation questions on the extracts, and an oral exam in which the examiner discusses the opening of Jane Eyre with you, one question at a time.
- Read long 19th-century sentences by finding the main clause and following the punctuation
- Retrieve explicit details and infer feelings and situations from 19th-century prose
- Analyse imagery, repetition, lists and sentence forms in extracts by Dickens, Brontë, Gaskell and Stevenson
- Explain how a writer structures a description to move the reader's focus
- Evaluate a critical statement about an extract, using evidence
- Use 19th-century social context to support analysis
Practice material written by Zestly, based on the DfE GCSE English language subject content (DFE-00232-2013: unseen texts from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries; AO1, AO2, AO4). Extracts are quoted from public-domain texts as published by Project Gutenberg: Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854) and Great Expectations (1861); Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847); Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855); Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886); Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874).
Sample question
Read this extract from Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854), describing the industrial town of Coketown: "It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next." What is the main effect of the repeated words 'like one another' and 'the same' in the final sentence?
- They present the streets and the people as identical and interchangeable, so life in Coketown seems monotonous and mechanical
- They suggest that Coketown is a lively, varied place full of surprises
- They show that the narrator cannot remember the details of the town
- They suggest that the people of Coketown are close friends who share everything
See the answer
They present the streets and the people as identical and interchangeable, so life in Coketown seems monotonous and mechanical
The repetition ('like one another', 'still more like', 'equally like'; 'the same hours', 'the same sound', 'the same pavements', 'the same work') makes the sentence itself feel repetitive. Streets, people and even time ('every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow') are reduced to identical units, as if the town's inhabitants were parts of its machinery.