AQA Paper 1 Section B covers the 19th-century prose novel. There are eight set texts; your school chooses one. The question gives an extract and asks you to write about it and the novel as a whole.
The eight set texts
- A Christmas Carol (Dickens)
- Great Expectations (Dickens)
- Jane Eyre (Brontë)
- Pride and Prejudice (Austen)
- Frankenstein (Shelley)
- Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson)
- The Sign of the Four (Conan Doyle)
- The Strange Case… / Telling Tales (anthology option)
Common themes across all 19th-century texts
Class and social mobility — all eight texts engage with Victorian class structures: Pip's aspirations, Jane's governess position, Elizabeth Bennet's economic dependence, Jekyll's respectable façade.
Duality and hidden selves — Jekyll/Hyde is the explicit case; but Victor Frankenstein hides his creation, Holmes hides his cocaine habit, Rochester hides Bertha.
Gender and female agency — Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet both make remarkable assertions of female will; Frankenstein's Elizabeth is passive by comparison; Mary Shelley's context (Wollstonecraft's daughter) is critical.
Moral responsibility — a Victorian preoccupation: Dickens on social responsibility (A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations), Shelley on scientific responsibility, Stevenson on the repression of desire.
Gothic elements — present in many texts: Frankenstein (the monster, the Arctic), Jekyll/Hyde (the laboratory, the urban night), Jane Eyre (the red room, Bertha).
The 19th-century context for AO3
Victorian Britain: the Industrial Revolution creating new wealth and new poverty; the Reform Acts extending political representation; women's legal inequality (the Married Women's Property Act 1870); scientific discovery challenging religious certainty; empire and colonial expansion.
Note: AO3 is only worth 2 marks in Section B. One well-embedded contextual point is sufficient — do not write extended context paragraphs.
Form: what 19th-century novels share
Most are long, morally serious narratives with:
- Retrospective first-person narration (Pip, Jane, Watson) or third-person omniscient narration (Austen).
- Serialisation — most were first published in monthly or weekly instalments. This affects pacing, cliff-hangers, character reveal.
- Social realism — even Gothic texts (Frankenstein, Jekyll/Hyde) are grounded in social observation.
Section B exam approach
- 50 minutes recommended.
- AO1 = 20 marks (dominant — argument and whole-text range).
- AO2 = 8 marks (language and structure).
- AO3 = 2 marks (one embedded contextual point).
- Roughly 40% extract analysis, 60% whole-novel discussion.
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