To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee · Published 1960 · Set 1933–35 in Maycomb, Alabama · Set text on Pearson Edexcel International GCSE English Literature (4ET1) — Modern Prose option

A child watches her town put an innocent man on trial — and learns what courage actually costs.

Two ways to study it

• Grade 9 Notes — condensed and exam-focused: 5 full character studies, 5 themes, quotation analysis, thesis statements and essay plans.
• The Complete Guide to To Kill a Mockingbird — the long version: 17 chapters from the world behind the text to the examination.

The characters covered

• Scout (Jean Louise Finch) — Two voices in one body — the child who sees and the adult who understands
• Atticus Finch — The conscience of Maycomb — and the argument readers have been having since 1960
• Jem (Jeremy Atticus Finch) — The novel's true casualty — the child old enough to understand what he sees
• Tom Robinson — The man the novel is about — and the man the novel barely lets speak
• Arthur ‘Boo’ Radley — The town's monster, who turns out to have been watching over the children all along

The themes covered

• Prejudice and the machinery of injustice — The novel's central subject is not racism as an attitude but racism as a system: a set of laws, habits, manners and assumptions that can take a case with no evidence and turn it into a conviction and a corpse, while everyone involved continues to think of themselves as decent. Lee's argument is that prejudice is taught, structural and respectable — and that its most dangerous form wears a jury's face, not a mob's.
• Innocence destroyed — the mockingbird — The title supplies the novel's moral test: some creatures do no harm and exist only to give, and destroying them is a sin rather than a crime. Lee attaches the symbol to two people — Tom Robinson and Arthur Radley — and to two kinds of destruction: the killing of a man, and the exposure of a shy one. The theme asks who a community protects and who it spends.
• Courage — The novel spends thirty-one chapters replacing one definition of courage with another. Maycomb's version is physical: guns, fists, dares, honour answered with violence. Lee's version, argued through Atticus, Mrs Dubose, Boo Radley and the children, is persistence without the prospect of winning — and its most demanding form is doing the right thing while your neighbours despise you for it.
• Class, poverty and the ladder Maycomb climbs — Maycomb sorts itself with a precision that has nothing to do with money: the Finches and their like, then the Cunninghams who are poor but pay their debts, then the Ewells who are poor and do not, and — below all of them in the town's arithmetic, whatever their conduct — Black families. Lee shows race and class as one interlocking hierarchy, and shows the Depression tightening every rung of it.
• Being a lady in Maycomb — gender and Southern womanhood — The less-obvious theme, and the one that unlocks the trial. Maycomb's rules for women are as rigid as its rules for race, and the two systems are welded together: the myth of protected white womanhood is the machinery that makes Mayella's accusation unanswerable, and the same code puts Scout in a dress and keeps women off Alabama juries.