Component 2: Prose – Science and Society – Pre-1900 — Edexcel A-Level English Literature

Component 2: Prose - Science and Society - Pre-1900 is a Pearson Edexcel A-Level English Literature exam component that explores how pre-1900 prose texts engage with scientific and social ideas. Students study one core prose text, such as Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' or Robert Louis Stevenson's 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', analysing themes, characterisation, and contextual influences.

This component focuses on pre-1900 prose texts that engage with scientific and social themes. Students explore how writers respond to scientific developments such as Darwinism, galvanism, and psychology, and how these ideas intersect with social issues like class, gender, and morality. The exam requires close analysis of language, structure, and context, with a strong emphasis on the theme of 'Science and Society'.

Studying this topic develops critical thinking about the relationship between literature and intellectual history. It prepares students for university-level literary study by honing skills in textual analysis, contextual research, and argumentation. The component is assessed through a closed-book exam, where students must write a comparative essay on their chosen prose text.

• →The impact of scientific discoveries (e.g. evolution, electricity, chemistry) on Victorian and Romantic literature.
• →The role of social responsibility in scientific experimentation and the consequences of transgression.
• →Narrative techniques such as framing, unreliable narration, and epistolary form used to explore scientific themes.
• →Contextual influences: the Industrial Revolution, religious doubt, and changing social structures.
• →The representation of monstrosity, duality, and the unconscious in pre-1900 prose.

• Analyse the effect of the multi-layered epistolary and frame narrative structure on the reader's sympathy and the reliability of the accounts.
• Evaluate Shelley's use of the Gothic genre and the sublime landscape to reflect the psychological states of Victor and the Creature.
• Compare Shelley's exploration of scientific ethics and creator responsibility with the thematic concerns of the chosen post-1900 text.
• Assess the influence of Romanticism and Enlightenment thinking on the characterisation of Victor Frankenstein.
• AO1: Name the structure with the board's own critical terms and the AO1 marks follow. This is an epistolary frame narrative: Walton's letters enclose Victor's spoken account, which encloses the creature's, which encloses Safie's letters. Write about narrators and narratees, not about a story within a story.
• AO1: Precision of naming is credit. The being has no name: call him the creature or the being, never Frankenstein, which belongs to his maker, and use the word monster only when the point is that other people make him one. The slip reads as knowledge of the films rather than the novel.
• AO1: Build the essay on a line of argument, not on the plot. The strongest thesis available is that the novel's sympathy moves: with the horrified maker in Volume 1, with the abandoned and eloquent being in Volume 2, and with neither by Volume 3. Say where sympathy sits at each hinge and what moves it.
• AO1: Treat Victor as a narrator, not only a protagonist. Everything known about the creature's crimes comes from a dying man justifying himself to a stranger he wants to impress, so an informed personal response can weigh his version against the creature's and against Walton's own ambition.
• AO2: The concentric narration is the meaning, not the packaging. Walton to Victor to the creature to Safie: the creature's self-defence sits at the innermost point of the book and reaches the reader only through the mouth of the man who hates him, so it is simultaneously the most centrally placed argument and the least verifiable one.
• AO2: Shelley gives the creature the highest register in the novel. His address is Miltonic and his logic is balanced and syllogistic, against Victor's exclamations, faintings and brain fevers. The effect is that the reader's judgement is pulled towards the speaker with the better argument, which is the one the plot calls a fiend.
• AO2: The animation scene works by withholding. The act gets one flat declarative sentence and no method at all, because Victor refuses to give Walton the secret; the horror is then supplied entirely by anatomy, the yellow skin, the watery eyes, the black lips. Shelley makes the reader look at a body instead of a machine.
• AO2: Doubling organises the plot. Maker and made pursue each other across the same ice, each surviving only to hunt the other, and the wedding-night threat is the sharpest structural irony in the book: Victor reads it as aimed at himself and posts himself as sentry, leaving Elizabeth alone in the room where she dies.
• AO2: Landscape carries argument rather than atmosphere. The Alpine sublime is offered as consolation and then used as a judgement, since the glacier that calms Victor is also the stage the creature walks out of with superhuman speed to put his case. Nature soothes him and prosecutes him in the same paragraph.
• AO3: Use galvanism on the text rather than beside it. Shelley writes in the decade of Aldini's public experiments on a hanged murderer's corpse and of Davy's claim that chemists had acquired new and almost unlimited powers, and she puts that claim nearly word for word into Waldman's lecture, which is the speech that converts Victor.
• AO3: The creature's defence is her father's philosophy. William Godwin argued in Political Justice that circumstances make men vicious, and the anonymous first edition was dedicated to him, so the creature's case is not special pleading invented for a monster but the radical position of the household Shelley grew up in, put on trial by the plot.
• AO3: Reception is a context Pearson credits, and here it changed the book's afterlife. Croker in the Quarterly Review called it a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity while Scott in Blackwood's praised it and assumed Percy Shelley wrote it, and Peake's 1823 stage version made the creature mute, which is where the speechless monster comes from.
• AO3: Read the novel as female Gothic, as Ellen Moers did, and the birth imagery organises it: a man makes a child without a woman, is revolted by the result, and abandons it. Anne Mellor's reading of Victor's science as an attempt to do without the female body follows the same evidence, and the 1831 revisions harden it.
• AO3: The made servant who turns on his owner is a post-revolutionary and abolition-era image, and the novel dates from a decade of Luddite machine-breaking and of the debate following the 1807 abolition of the slave trade. The creature's bargain, exile in exchange for a companion, is the language of manumission refused.
• AO4: Within the Science and Society pairing, set the creature's demand against Never Let Me Go: both texts put a manufactured person's claim to love and a soul at the centre, and both refuse it. The comparison is about voice, since Shelley gives her creature Miltonic rhetoric and Ishiguro gives Kathy a mild euphemism that never protests.
• AO4: On Science and Society, compare who controls the record. Frankenstein reaches us as Walton's transcription of a dying man, and The Handmaid's Tale reaches us as an academic reconstruction of tapes two centuries later, so in both texts a first-person testimony survives only inside a frame written by someone with their own interest in it.
• AO4: A comparative thesis that works across the whole theme: Shelley locates danger in one man working alone and in secret, while both post-1900 partners locate it in an institution that has normalised the same act. Blame is personal in Frankenstein and administrative in The Handmaid's Tale and Never Let Me Go.
• AO4: Reproduction is the sharpest Science and Society comparison with The Handmaid's Tale. Victor destroys the female creature because of what she might bear and because she might not consent to the bargain made about her, and Gilead answers the same anxiety from the other direction by reducing women to their fertility.
• AO4: For centres taking both pre-1900 options, The War of the Worlds gives the nearest formal comparison within Science and Society: both are retrospective first-person survivor narratives about a superior being, but Wells removes sympathy from the equation and makes it biology, where Shelley makes it the whole question.
• Evaluate how Wells uses the Martian invasion to satirise British imperial expansion and colonial violence.
• Analyse the narrative structure, focusing on the unnamed protagonist's journalistic, retrospective account to create realism.
• Assess the representation of 'Science and Society' through the contrast between human complacency and Martian technological superiority.
• Explore the influence of pre-1900 contexts, such as Darwinian evolution and fin-de-siecle anxiety, on the novel's thematic development.
• AO1: Name the form exactly: a first person retrospective scientific romance cast as a survivor's memoir, not an adventure story. Keep 'the narrator' for judgements made inside the account and reserve 'Wells' for the shaping intelligence behind the form. Examiners reward that distinction and penalise its collapse.
• AO1: Build a working vocabulary before the exam: scientific romance, invasion narrative, reverse colonisation, fin de siecle degeneration, Darwinian struggle, eyewitness testimony, free indirect discourse, prolepsis, bathos. Deploy two or three with precision rather than ten loosely, since unearned labels read as padding.
• AO1: Enter a critical debate rather than reporting one. Readings divide over whether the novel indicts imperial conquest by turning it on the metropolis, or whether its Darwinian frame makes domination look like natural law. Take a position, concede the strongest counter reading, and show which features of the prose settle it.
• AO2: Show what the documentary register buys Wells. Surveyed place names, timetabled hours, measured distances and the vocabulary of the laboratory make the improbable auditable. The reader is invited to verify rather than to marvel, so the fantastic arrives pre authenticated and its implications land as report rather than fable.
• AO2: Argue that the two book design is a change of lens, not simply a change of place. Book One works at parish scale through a single observer; Book Two narrows to confinement and then opens onto the prospects of a species. Read the join between them as Wells's argument about how perspective governs understanding.
• AO2: Note how Wells manages suspense through selective prolepsis. The retrospective voice discloses the narrator's own survival early on, but deliberately withholds the mechanism of the invaders' defeat until Book Two, Chapter 8. This converts the narrative from a simple survival tale into a broader inquiry about humanity's fate, which is precisely the posture a scientific romance needs its reader to adopt.
• AO3: Do not simply report that Wells studied under T H Huxley. Use the training to explain a method: the narrator anatomises the invaders as a species, so evolutionary theory supplies the novel's organising logic rather than its subject matter. Argue that this biological framing is what makes Victorian ideas of progress look provisional, and anchor the claim in the vocabulary of the sentence you are quoting.
• AO3: Treat the Tasmanian analogy as structural, not illustrative. It is placed in the opening frame, so every later episode is read back through it, and the first person plural implicates the British reader in the position Wells then reverses. Marks come from showing that the novel turns the imperial adventure romance inside out, with the metropolitan centre as the ground being occupied.
• AO3: Use the invasion-scare tradition comparatively rather than as background. Its readers expected a cautionary tale about national preparedness, and Wells supplies the familiar furniture, the Home Counties, the mobilised batteries, the telegraph and the special edition, before withdrawing the consolation that better defence would have altered the outcome. Name the generic expectation, then the sentence that defeats it.
• AO4: Both texts examine what a society does with beings it has classed as usable, so make the contrast one of narrative method rather than subject. Wells states the analogy openly and early, placing the reader in the position of the lesser species; Ishiguro proceeds by euphemism and a narrator who never protests, so the reader must supply the objection. Explicit polemic against withheld protest is the argument.
• AO4: Both texts generate terror by defamiliarising the domestic landscape. Wells transforms the mundane Surrey suburbs into a scorched, alien wasteland, weaponising the reader's own geography. Atwood overlays theocratic Gilead onto Cambridge, Massachusetts, using the uncanny persistence of the old world beneath the new to emphasise how swiftly civil rights can evaporate. Compare the psychological impact of ruined local topography.
• AO4: Both frame disaster as a document composed afterwards, so compare how each treats the record itself. Wells authenticates the account with dates, place names and professional detachment, reflecting period confidence in the reliable observer. Atwood submits her narrative to later academics whose complacency is satirised, so the curating of testimony is itself put on trial.

• 💡Integrate context seamlessly by linking Victor's experiments to 19th-century scientific developments like galvanism.
• 💡Use the concept of the 'doppelgänger' to explore the psychological mirroring between Victor and his creation.
• 💡Ensure your comparative essay maintains a balanced focus on how both texts explore the intersection of science and societal values.
• 💡Compare Wells's destructive technology with another Science and Society text; the companion may be pre- or post-1900 because Wells already fulfils the requirement that at least one text in the pair is pre-1900.
• 💡Use the Artilleryman's survivalist rhetoric to discuss the moral compromises society makes when faced with scientific annihilation.
• 💡Integrate contextual knowledge of the British Empire seamlessly into your analysis of the Martians' colonial behaviour.
• 💡Always use the text to drive your argument. Avoid writing a history essay; instead, show how context illuminates specific quotations.
• 💡Plan your essay around the theme of 'Science and Society' rather than character or plot. This ensures you address the assessment objectives.
• 💡Use precise literary terminology (e.g. 'foreshadowing', 'juxtaposition', 'bildungsroman') to demonstrate AO2 knowledge.

• Confusing the creator (Victor) with the Creature; always refer to the creation as 'the Creature' or 'the Monster', not 'Frankenstein'.
• Treating the text merely as a horror story without addressing the specific 'Science and Society' contextual debates of the 19th century.
• Neglecting the narrative voices of Walton and the Creature; ensure analysis covers all three narrative layers, not just Victor's perspective.
• Error: Treating the novel merely as an action-based alien invasion story. Correction: Analyse it as a complex social critique of Victorian imperialism and human hubris.
• Error: Ignoring the specific pre-1900 scientific context. Correction: Explicitly connect the text to 19th-century theories like social Darwinism and thermodynamics.
• Error: Focusing solely on the Martians without discussing human reactions. Correction: Examine how different societal factions, such as the Curate and the Artilleryman, represent varying ideological failures.
• Students often think that 'context' means simply describing historical events. In fact, context must be integrated into analysis of the text's language and themes.
• Many assume that pre-1900 texts are irrelevant to modern concerns. However, the themes of scientific ethics and social responsibility remain highly pertinent today.
• Some students believe that only the main character matters. Yet minor characters and narrative frames are crucial for exploring the theme of Science and Society.

1. 1Week 1: Read the set text carefully, making notes on key themes, characters, and quotations related to Science and Society.
2. 2Week 1-2: Research the historical and scientific context (e.g. galvanism, Darwinism, Victorian morality) and create a context bank with links to the text.
3. 3Week 2: Practise close analysis of 5-10 key extracts, focusing on language, structure, and how they convey scientific and social ideas.
4. 4Week 2: Write at least two timed essays (25 marks) and self-assess using the mark scheme, focusing on integrating context and terminology.
5. 5Ongoing: Use active recall to memorise quotations and contextual facts, and review examiner reports for common pitfalls.

• 📋Essay question: 'Explore how [writer] presents [theme] in [text].' You must write a comparative essay if two texts are studied. Advice: Plan your argument around the theme, not the plot.
• 📋Extract-based question: 'Analyse the extract and discuss how it relates to the theme of Science and Society.' Advice: Use the extract as a springboard to discuss the whole text.
• 📋Context-focused question: 'How does the context of [period] influence the presentation of [theme]?' Advice: Integrate context into your analysis of quotations, not as separate background information.