AQA English Literature GCSE Revision

J & H: Setting

This Victorian London comes from the rule of Queen Victoria, the 2nd longest Monarch only second to our current queen. During her reign the British empire expanded to its largest ever point. The British navy began to colonise more and more countries.
The people believed other cultures were savages, because of their strange ways and the fact they gave into pleasure. They truly believed they would too become savage if they followed their urges.

London was going though a industrial revolution. Cities massively increased in population due to the lack of jobs in the country side. Huge factories were built that could handle a lot of people working.
However this lead to mass poverty in areas where housing was cheaper. Lots of family's shared 1 room for everything like cooking and sleeping. This meant there was mass spreading of diseases that lead to low life expectancies. Children would often die before the age of 5.

One area that was small yet over crowded was Soho. Where Hyde lives.
This lead to it receiving a bad reputation. The majority of people reading the book at the time of its release would have been upper class, because there was a higher literacy rate since children actually went to school and not to a factory to crawl under machinery.
This meant the reader would have been able to relate to the book, knowing that the area is particularly bad would have created a sense of foreboding and presented Hyde as a bad character, one Utterson (our main voice) should steer clear from.
It also shows the higher class walking through and experiencing Soho which is what people would have done. This helps it play on fear and suspense. What also helps is the fact it a gothic novel set in the present time and not the past like it is usually, so it's showing what reality was like.

Soho is described to have a gin palace which was a place where working class could get a cheap drink. And a low French eating house which shows the increase in poor migrants who came looking for jobs in the famous city. This is an accurate representation of the real Soho.

In London there was a lot of Smog. Thick fog caused by pollution from the mass factories. It made it difficult to see at night time and it meant there had to be a lot of oil based lamps in the streets. But at nighttime it became dangerous. With people like Jack the Ripper waiting in the shadows. Or in the novel people like Hyde who "calmly trample" over small children.