A-Level
English Literature A
LTA1A: Unit 1: Texts in Context – Victorian Literature
Report on the Examination
2740
June 2015
Version: 1.0
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REPORT ON THE EXAMINATION – A-level English Literature A – 2740 – June 2015
Question 1
The choice of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians as the source text for this year’s Question 1
was both challenging and stimulating, requiring genuine exploration and independent thought from
those who produced effective responses. Many students recognised that the extract features a
wide range of Victorian themes – such as evolving attitudes to faith, duty, race and imperialism –
and were able to relate Strachey’s ideas both to their Wider Reading and to their contextual
knowledge of the period. For some students, ‘The End of General Gordon’ was emblematic of the
end of the Victorian era.
In their answers, many students chose to focus on the ways in which Strachey presents General
Gordon himself, exploring the dualities and ambiguities to be found in this subtly layered portrait.
The rhetorical questions and free indirect speech with which Strachey presents Gordon’s inner
conflicts attracted much comment, as did the irony that Gordon’s indecision only came to an end
when the arrival of the Arab insurgents “saved him the necessity of making up his mind”. Many
students noted the religious register which Strachey employs in his depiction of Gordon, seeing
him as a Christ-like figure or a martyr, willing “to maintain the faith...and to suffer for it”. Not all
realised the full implications of the “gunpowder put into the cellars of the palace”, but some
understood the extent of the self-sacrifice it indicates. Some argued that Gordon’s willingness to
“remain a… witness of his Lord” makes him seem like a missionary, using this idea as the starting
point for an exploration of Charlotte Brontë’s presentation of St John Rivers in Jane Eyre; other
students successfully used the presentation of Bertha Mason in this novel as a typical example of
the Victorian response to otherness.
For many students, Strachey’s description of Gordon as “a saint” provided the climax of the
passage’s religious language, an idea reinforced by Gordon’s “white uniform”. The image of a
white man in a white uniform occasioned much comment, as did the image’s Victorian overtones of
chivalry (which some students took as an opportunity to establish links with Tennyson’s medieval
poems) and decency: an idea which is emphasised by Strachey’s reference to Gordon as simply
“the Englishman”. The reference to Gordon “on the roof, in his dressing-gown” was the subject of
much comment, and not a little mirth, among the students who sat this year’s LTA1A examination.
It was variously felt that the effect of this image is to make Gordon appear unprepared, vulnerable,
or even lazy. Some linked it to the fact that Gordon “remained undecided” about his situation; one
felt that Strachey had deliberately made it seem “as if the attack came past his bedtime”; another
argued that Gordon is presented as “a metrosexual”. Perhaps the most astute comment on this
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ambiguous image came from the student who wrote: “Donning his uniform was the proper way of
doing things – an Englishman simply does not fight in his dressing-gown.”
More confident students often explored Strachey’s presentation of what one referred to as
“Gordon’s doubleness”; some even linked this concept to its rather more frivolous presentation in
Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. The idea that his “whole life was passed in
contradiction” is reflected in Gordon’s attempt “to be ready for every contingency” by preparing
both for self-destruction and for escape upriver; it is also embodied in the structure of Strachey’s
account. Many students considered the way in which Strachey presents alternative versions of
Gordon’s death: “not a saint but a warrior”. Some students argued that each of these possibilities
would, in their own way, be admirable to the Victorian public but others felt that the latter might
imply, to Strachey’s post-Victorian readership, that Gordon is just as savage as “his antagonists”:
that the “Dervishes who instantly hacked him to death” are no worse than an Englishman who
creates a “heap of corpses”. Most were able to agree, at least, that General Gordon had
technology on his side: Strachey’s references to “gunpowder”, “little armoured vessels” and a
“revolver” received much attention, even if, when taking up a sword himself, he is ultimately
brought down to the level of “the assailants”, both literally and figuratively.
Students who seized upon the phrase “steam up” as an excuse to unload their extensive
collections of railway-related Wider Reading betrayed their failure to read the extract in a suitably
close manner. Those who read the passage carefully understood that “steam up” is not a
reference to Victorian locomotives but to Gordon’s gunboats, moored on the Nile. Unfortunately,
some students were equally careless in their reading of the question itself, as became evident from
their claims that Strachey wrote the text in the Victorian era or that Eminent Victorians is a novel.
Conversely, some of those students who assimilated the contextual information contained in the
question were able to put it to good use: a thoughtful few considered the ways in which the events
of the four years leading up to the text’s 1918 publication date might have influenced Strachey’s
feelings about the slaughter of a self-sacrificing Englishman.
A number of students were well informed about General Gordon or about Strachey. Some put
their contextual knowledge of events in the Sudan to relevant use.
Strachey’s presentation of Gordon’s Arab opponents was a frequent subject for analysis in the
responses. The contrast between their “many-coloured” apparel and the General’s white uniform
attracted much attention, as did the effects created by Strachey’s use of Arabic speech and
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terminology: a device which, many felt, emphasises their otherness. Although Strachey provides a
translation of Tala Shahin’s execrations, he leaves “jibbehs” unexplained: for this reason, the term
also went unglossed on the examination paper, enabling students to share the experience of
Eminent Victorians’ original readers in encountering something alien and not entirely understood.
Many students also explored the writer’s ambivalence towards the Arabs, contrasting his apparent
admiration for their exotic and “splendid” appearance to the savagery of their actions – Gordon was
“instantly hacked to death”.
Some argued that Strachey suggests a kind of decadence in the richness of their description, to
prepare the reader for the depravity to come, while others felt that they are made to seem as
intimidating as possible – these are “the fiercest of the Mahdi’s followers” – in order to emphasise
the heroism of Gordon’s fight against impossible odds. The epithet “tall and swarthy” also caught
the attention of students, with its echoes of the “almost… swarthy complexion” of Alec D’Urberville:
some noted that, in much Victorian writing, swarthiness is synonymous with villainy. Some of the
students who explored the extract’s structure perceptively remarked on the way in which the Arabs
suddenly appear in mid-paragraph, catching the reader off-guard in the same way that Gordon
was.
As the wording of this year’s question did not include the Sudanese location of Gordon’s demise,
students were not penalised if they assumed that the events described by Strachey were taking
place in India, or any other plausible part of the map that had been painted British Red in the
nineteenth century. However, those few students who assumed that the Mahdi’s forces were
invading Britain showed a distinctly insecure grasp of the Victorian context. Those students who
guessed at a sub-continental setting for the extract were often well versed in the literature of the
1857 Indian Mutiny. Examiners were very impressed by the knowledge and understanding
displayed by these students in their explorations of texts.
Examiners often commented on the ways in which successful students show independence and
originality in their choice of Wider Reading texts. Although many students’ answers made effective
use of such well-known imperial verse as Henry Newbolt's ‘Vitai Lampada’ (which features a bloodsoaked desert setting not unlike the Sudan) and Thomas Hardy's ‘Drummer Hodge’ (in which, like
Strachey, the poet enhances the effects of his writing through the integration of non English
vocabulary), others turned to more obscure but no less relevant poems. Francis Ames’ ‘An ABC
for Baby Patriots’ or ‘England, My England’ by William Ernest Henley.
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Self-sacrifice is also an important theme in ‘The White Man’s Burden’ by Rudyard Kipling, although
not all students appeared to be aware of it. This was a popular poem this summer, making more
appearances in the responses to Question 1 than any other poem. It also proved to be a very
effective discriminator between those students who felt that it was sufficient to throw in their "halfdevil and half-child" quotation, brand Kipling a racist, then move on to their next Wider Reading
reference, and those more discerning students who had read the poem carefully and
closely. Many well-informed students considered the ways in which, elsewhere in Kipling's oeuvre,
he expresses his respect for the peoples colonised by Britain ( “You’re a better man than I am,
Gunga Din”) and warns the British against becoming “drunk with sight of power” (in
‘Recessional’). The ways in which Kipling satirises imperialist excess in the allegorical short story,
The Man Who Would Be King, also received some attention - as did Beyond The Pale, along with
the poems ‘A Song of the White Men’, ‘Tommy’ and ‘East Is East’.
Kipling may well be considered to be the arch-poet of Empire but, as many students noted,
Tennyson too was not averse to the promotion of Britain's imperial mission - especially in his years
as Poet Laureate. ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of
Wellington’ made regular and relevant appearances in the responses to Question 1. Some
students connected Ulysses’ determination “not to yield” with Gordon's
"intrepidity...skill...desperation"; others explored the rather startling presentation of the exotic in
‘Locksley; a few even sought out the references to Empire in ‘The Princess’, such as “those two
crowned twins, / Commerce and conquest”.
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness was the most frequently used prose text in the responses to
Question 1: some students perceptively applied Marlow's idea of “the fascination of the
abomination” to Strachey's presentation of the Dervishes; Some students contrasted Strachey's
post-Victorian presentation of Africa to the ways in which William Booth inverted familiar colonial
tropes in his polemic In Darkest England and The Way Out; others made effective use of Imperial
Duty, the lecture delivered by John Ruskin at his inauguration as Oxford’s Slade Professor of Fine
Art in 1870. Charles Darwin’s presentation of the natives of Tierra del Fuego in The Descent of
Man furnished some students with a more typical Victorian view of otherness, while Wilkie
Collins' The Woman in White offered an alternative representation of Englishness in the form of
Professor Pesca, the Italian who has done “his utmost to turn himself into an Englishman” in
gratitude for the political asylum he has been granted. H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon’s
Mines (1885) and Graham Swift's Ever After (1992) were among other prose texts of interest to
feature in these answers.
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Some students explored Victorian dramatic representations of Empire, such as Henry Arthur
Jones’ 1899 play Carnac Sahib or Rushton's flashback to his family's encounter with cannibals in
John Walker's The Factory Lad. Twentieth century plays also featured regularly, including Barry
England's 1969 Raj drama, Conduct Unbecoming, as well as Brian Friel's plays about the British
colonisation of Ireland, The Home Place and Translations. Other students made use of Wider
Reading plays which, though not directly concerned with Empire, were of direct relevance to the
extract. Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance gave students a chance to explore the
aloofness of late Victorian attitudes towards foreigners, as well as Hester's shockingly alternative
perspective on Britain (and, implicitly, its empire) as “a leper in purple” and “a dead thing smeared
with gold”. Similarly, many students used A Doll’s House to explore Ibsen and Strachey's
contrasting presentations of nineteenth century ideas about duty (“I have another duty, just as
sacred… My duty to myself!”), making choices (Nora Helmer makes her own, unlike General
Gordon who has his made for him) and faith (“I don’t really know what religion is.”).
Question 2
The poetry of John Clare once again attracted the attention of a significant number of schools and
colleges; this was the more popular of the two Clare questions. ‘I Am’ was by far the poem most
frequently chosen as a starting point for the responses to this question; it proved to be a very
effective starting point, too, as the line “what I am, none cares or knows” provided a useful
springboard into Clare’s presentation of his search for his own identity.
Students with a commanding overview of the poetry sometimes chose ‘An Invite to Eternity’ as an
alternative starting point: here, Clare’s invitation to accompany him “through this sad non-identity”
provided a relevant opening by taking students directly to the question’s keywords. The set
selection’s ‘John Clare, Poet’ section also provided a range of relevant material for this question,
and many students wisely opted to focus on some of these poems in their answers. Clare’s third
person approach to himself in ‘The Peasant Poet’ was the subject of much comment, as was the
sequence of identities he considers here: “a silent man”, “a thinker”, “a peasant”, “The Poet”. The
ambiguities of identity created by a similar third person approach in ‘To John Clare’ were explored
by some students, while the apparent detachment created by Clare’s repeated self-labelling as
“Bard” in ‘To be Placed at the Back of his Portrait’ was also the subject of much perceptive
comment.
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For those who ranged beyond the set text’s final section, ‘The Flitting’ provided an opportunity both
to explore Clare’s search for identity in a place where “all is strange and new” and to build a
counter-argument based on the poet’s love of nature: “I feel at times a love and joy / For every
weed and every thing”. Nature was the most frequent alternative theme for those students who
chose to argue with the question’s given view as they debated the importance of identity in Clare’s
poetry; love was also a popular choice. Many students produced well informed responses to the
poetry they had studied and most were able to show at least some understanding of their set text.
There were some impressive explorations of the effects produced by Clare’s poetic techniques,
although some students devoted too much of their answers to Clare's use of punctuation.
Question 3
Many of those students who opted for Question 6 explored the poet’s green message with
enthusiasm and sensitivity, linking ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’ to a range of poems in which Clare
decries the desecration of the landscapes that he loved. Most of the students who attempted this
question had a secure knowledge of the named poem and produced engaged responses to the
powerful ways in which Clare gives a voice to the land itself in this dramatic monologue.
Connections to ‘The Fallen Elm’ featured frequently in these answers, while other popular and
relevant choices included ‘Remembrances’ (two hundred years since Waterloo, the line “Enclosure
like a Bonaparte let not a thing remain” was much quoted), ‘Decay, a Ballad’ (in which “The sky
hangs o’er a broken dream”), ‘Song: Last Day’ (with its apocalyptic “And earth no more shall be”)
and ‘The Moors’ (where the open fields are divided up “in little parcels little minds to please”).
Some students created balanced responses by contrasting Clare’s bitter presentation of rural
devastation in ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’ to the Arcadian idyll of ‘Summer Tints’ and other early
sonnets, as well as to ‘Emmonsales Heath’ – which “stern industry… / Still leaves untouched”.
Question 4
Examiners noted an increase in the number of schools and colleges offering the poetry of the
Brontës as their Section B set text. The responses to this selection were fairly evenly divided
between the two questions and, for those who chose Question 4, Emily Brontë’s ‘No coward soul is
mine’ was the most popular starting point, the double denial of its opening couplet enabling
students to engage directly with the keyword “defiance” right from the start. Unfortunately, too
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many students chose not to start with the poetry but wrote long contextual accounts of the Brontës’
lives instead. Previous reports have advised against this practice. In the responses which did
engage fully with the poems themselves, ‘The Prisoner’ by Emily Brontë worked especially well:
the unconventional use of a female captive was the subject of much relevant comment and the
poem is full of defiant, rebellious exclamations such as “Yet these are little worth, your bolts and
irons strong, / …they could not hold me long.” Students also found forceful notes of defiance in ‘F.
De Samara to A.G.A.’ (“There, go, Deceiver, go!”) and ‘Stanzas’ (“I’ll not weep that thou art going
to leave me”), while the rebellious rejection of most that the world can offer in ‘The Old Stoic’
(“Riches I hold in light esteem; / And love I laugh to scorn”) caught the attention of students who
had developed a comprehensive knowledge of their set text. Some found rebellion and defiance in
the “spleen and treachery” of Grundy in Branwell Brontë’s ‘The man who will not know another’,
while closer readers even found hints in the more orthodox sentiments of Charlotte Brontë: in her
reference to “My wilful spirit” in ‘The Teacher’s Monologue’, for example. The poems of Anne
Brontë were most often used to provide a counter-argument to the question’s given view.
Question 5
This question proved to be a very effective discriminator between those students whose knowledge
of ‘Loud without the wind was roaring’ enabled them to link it to a range of other Brontë poems and
those who quickly dismissed the named poem so that they could write about other poems instead.
The latter approach inevitably produced very general responses which examiners were able to
place in Band 2 of the mark scheme at best. This type of question is not an invitation to students
to write everything they know about the Brontës, nor to unload the poems they have prepared in
advance, irrespective of the one named as a potential key to the selection. In this question, some
students displayed the tendency to label poems as simply “positive” or negative”. As mentioned in
previous reports, the excessive use of these simplistic terms is not helpful: if they are to reach the
higher bands of the mark scheme, students need to be “fluently using appropriate terminology” to
meet the requirements of Assessment Objective 1. Some close reading students considered the
effects created by Emily Brontë’s use of a poem-within-a-poem structure in ‘Loud without the wind
was roaring’ (a device also used in ‘The Golden Year’, as some students of Tennyson noted), but
most focused immediately on the speaker’s affection for moors and mountains: this poem, as many
were aware, is one of Emily Brontë’s most powerful poetic evocations of the landscapes that
dominate her novel, Wuthering Heights. Many students recognised that Anne Brontë expresses
similar sentiments in ‘Lines Written at Thorp Green’, while her poem ‘Home’ was also a popular
choice for those who sought to establish connections to the focal poem’s idea of unutterable
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feelings “in exile afar”. These students sometimes made use of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘The Teacher’s
Monologue’ too (“Sweet dreams of home my heart may fill”), while Emily Brontë’s Romantic
sensibilities, many argued, find direct echoes in Branwell Brontë’s ‘Penmaenmawr’.
Question 6
Tennyson's poetry was the most popular set text on this year's paper and the responses were
evenly divided between the two questions. Most of the candidates who answered Question 6 were
able to engage with its keywords, showing an understanding that tastes change with time and that
poems which probably pleased the broad Victorian populace may well have a more limited appeal
today. Many students agreed with the view that Tennyson's personal poetry is more likely to
engage the interest of a modern reader, but there was also a significant number who argued that
the public poetry offers just as much to those who have turned their enquiring minds to the study of
Victorian literature. The public poems used most frequently in these answers were ‘The Charge of
the Light Brigade’ and ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’. The latter poem’s rather
forced patriotism provided plenty of material for those who agreed with the given view: the line
“With honour, honour, honour, honour to him” was used by many students as evidence that
Tennyson was not at his most inspired when turning out poems to order for state occasions.
Unfortunately, some students, who had already used one of these public poems in their answer to
Question 1, chose to write about the same poem in their answer to Question 6. The personal
poems used in the answers to this question included ‘To E. Fitzgerald’ and ‘June Bracken and
Heather’, but by far the most popular choices were ‘In Memoriam’ and ‘Crossing the Bar’. More
sophisticated students often remarked on the liminal status of the latter two poems: while they may
have started out as personal poetry, they have become public property due to the universality of
ideas such as “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all” and “I hope to
see my Pilot face to face / When I have crost the bar”, as well as the useful shorthand of
phrases like “Nature, red in tooth and claw”. Some students were more comfortable with the idea
of personal poetry and took “public” to mean “published” or anything that was not overtly
autobiographical. Examiners could accept these definitions but their limitations meant
that such answers seldom met the requirements of the mark scheme's highest band.
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Question 7
Many of the students who produced successful answers to this question were fully aware that
Assessment Objective 4 is not tested in Section B, so they did not waste time on long biographical
introductions but got stuck straight into the named poem and the idea that it provides an effective
introduction to the selection. Less successful students often adopted a doggedly biographical
approach to the poem and the question, attempting to link the poem line-by-line to the known facts
about Tennyson's relationship with his father: these answers often became bogged down in
speculation and irrelevance.
The best responses often explored the dark, sinister mood of the poem and notes that some
terrible things have happened to the speaker but the reader cannot know exactly what they
are. Some students saw ‘The Outcast’ as a psychological landscape in the Romantic tradition (a
technique Tennyson also uses in ‘Maud’); others explored the ways in which the imagery of
abandonment in this unpublished poem is recycled by Tennyson in ‘Mariana’: “The wet moss
crusts the parting wall” evolves into “With blackest moss the flower-pots / Were thickly
crusted”. Often, these were the students who engaged with the fact that the “Father's Hall” is now
“voiceless” because it is in ruins: an idea which eluded those students who read less
closely. Many students used the given poem’s theme of loss to establish relevant links to poems
such as ‘Break, Break, Break...’ and ‘In Memoriam’.
Mark Ranges and Award of Grades
Grade boundaries and cumulative percentage grades are available on the Results Statistics
page of the AQA Website.
Converting Marks into UMS marks
Convert raw marks into Uniform Mark Scale (UMS) marks by using the link below.
UMS conversion calculator
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