Pearson A-level English Literature

How Dracula is examined. Paper 2 asks candidates to compare two prose texts from one theme, at least one pre-1900. In The Supernatural, the pre-1900 texts are Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray; the post-1900 texts are Beloved and The Little Stranger. Every question begins “Compare the ways in which the writers of your two chosen texts…” and ends “You must relate your discussion to relevant contextual factors.” [40 marks]. Open book (clean copies). Pearson’s reports call the Dracula/Dorian Gray pairing very popular. AO5 (other interpretations) is not assessed on this paper. Use a critical reading where it develops the assessed argument or relevant context, rather than expecting separate credit for citing a critic.

Browse the Pearson 9ET0 question records. Exact question excerpts, shortened prompts and report-based summaries are labelled separately. Open the original paper for the complete instruction, extract and rubric.

Read each year’s questions before its feedback. The wording labels distinguish recorded excerpts from summaries that still need checking against the paper. General-paper and unseen-passage comments are identified separately; a report may not discuss every question listed.

Report: report, pp. 66–67 (PDF), summary p. 87. Source details.

Questions in this series. The recorded wording below is labelled as an excerpt or a summary; use the original paper for the complete instruction and any supplied passage.

What the examiners reported

• Supernatural revealing character (Q9): many discussed the supernatural and character but never connected them. Some wrote about the Count’s appearance, which is not really supernatural. The best Dracula answers focused on how vampirism transforms women, and moved from there to the New Woman and fin-de-siècle anxieties.

• Good and evil (Q10): Dracula and Dorian Gray was a popular and successful pairing – for example, contrasting the Count’s monstrous appearance with Dorian’s beauty concealing corruption. Top answers saw that good and evil are hard to separate. Weaker ones read Dracula in simple moral terms and missed ambiguous figures such as Lucy and Renfield.

• General: introductions that narrow a broad prompt to a few defined strands work well. Comparison should be specific (genre, narrative perspective, authorial intent), not generic links such as similarly or on the other hand. “Evaluative” does not mean judging which novel is better written. Plan briefly; many controlled essays ended abruptly for lack of time. The summary advice: “Use your introduction to define the line of argument you are going to take.”

• This report’s annotated Level 5 scripts are on other texts (Hard Times, Atonement, The Color Purple), not Dracula.

Report: report, pp. 79–93. Source details.

Questions in this series. The recorded wording below is labelled as an excerpt or a summary; use the original paper for the complete instruction and any supplied passage.

What the examiners reported

• Women (Q9, pp. 79–80): weak answers described the women; strong ones argued about women’s position, sexuality and Gothic convention, with context woven in. Don’t assume a single Victorian context fits both novels: Stoker’s and Wilde’s backgrounds and aims differ. Cover a range of women, including minor figures and what men say about women.

• The Mina point (p. 80): many set Lucy (the New Woman, promiscuity) against Mina (domestic femininity). Better answers saw that Mina “combines modernity and convention”: she works, leads the search and uses new technology, but in the men’s service and with her modesty and faith intact.

• Close analysis that impressed: blood on white clothing in Dracula set against Sibyl Vane’s flower imagery.

• Biography (p. 80): some successful essays cited, as context, the claim that Stoker caught a sexual disease from prostitutes. The report does not challenge it. This is a contested speculation (usually traced to Daniel Farson’s 1975 biography); it should not be presented as established biography.

• Menace (Q10, p. 86): the best answers combined Gothic convention with the social menaces each novel depicts – the foreign other in Dracula, London’s hidden corruption in Dorian Gray – and looked beyond supernatural beings to settings and relationships. A common slip was writing about fear, threat or “evil characters” instead of menace. Defining “menace” in the introduction helped. Useful contexts: reverse colonisation, physiognomy, fears of invasion from the East.

Report: report, p. 142. Source details.

Questions in this series. The recorded wording below is labelled as an excerpt or a summary; use the original paper for the complete instruction and any supplied passage.

What the examiners reported

• Imbalances of power (Q10): many linked Lucy to the threatening New Woman, but “very few explored the idea that Mina is also a … New Woman figure”, for example through her shorthand and her “man’s brain”.

Report: report, pp. 52–56. Source details.

Questions in this series. The recorded wording below is labelled as an excerpt or a summary; use the original paper for the complete instruction and any supplied passage.

What the examiners reported

• Supernatural beings or events (Q10): Dorian’s portrait was read as a supernatural entity carrying the moral burden of his debauchery, and as a critique of late-Victorian hypocrisy. Weak answers listed the supernatural characters without considering how they are presented.

Report: report, p. 80. Source details.

Questions in this series. The recorded wording below is labelled as an excerpt or a summary; use the original paper for the complete instruction and any supplied passage.

What the examiners reported

• The Q10 (social status) script captioned as Dracula and Dorian Gray is in fact on The Little Stranger and Dorian Gray. Do not cite it as a Dracula exemplar.

Report: report, pp. 4–5, 93–102. Source details.

Questions in this series. The recorded wording below is labelled as an excerpt or a summary; use the original paper for the complete instruction and any supplied passage.

What the examiners reported

• Plan a conceptual argument and state it early; avoid formulaic introductions; open paragraphs with the connection between the texts, then probe each text.

• Make context specific. The report contrasts a bare statement that Victorian society was patriarchal with a developed point about anxieties over women’s demands for freedom shaping Stoker’s emasculated men.

• The Q9 (deviation) exemplars use Beloved, not Dracula.

These are AS Literature tasks, distinct from the A-level 9ET0 questions above. The summaries below come from the reports, rather than a checked transcription of the full questions.

Q9 – control; Q10 – tension surrounding supernatural events. Both require comparison of two chosen texts. These are report-based summaries.

• Summer 2023 report: weaker answers compared events in the two novels rather than ideas, and “rarely moved beyond word-level analysis” (PDF p. 4); critics appear only as context on this paper (PDF p. 5). Supernatural questions were on control (Q9) and tension around supernatural events (Q10), where Dracula and Beloved were the most popular texts (PDF p. 7). Source details.

Q10 – the presentation of death. The feedback below concerns this comparative task; it is a report-based summary.

• Summer 2025 report: biography was the most popular form of context, and weaker candidates made “quite simplistic links between biography and text” (PDF p. 7); weaker comparisons were tenuous or merely asserted (PDF p. 9). Q10 on death was popular, mostly Dracula with Beloved; stronger answers covered physical and metaphysical death and the novelists’ techniques rather than listing examples (PDF p. 15). Source details.

• June 2019 – mark scheme, indicative content p. 16, level grids pp. 14–15. Source details.

• Q9 women: Lucy and Mina in relation to the supernatural; women’s points of view through letters and diaries; stereotypes (the idealised Lucy, the “angel in the house”); narrative voice; the developing independence of women in Dracula.

• Q10 menace: early signs of menace; structure that builds it (Stoker’s shifts of location); characters developing under menace (Lucy’s decline, Dorian’s degeneration); immigration in Dracula, moral anxiety in Dorian Gray; menace in relationships; locations (Whitby, Dorian’s attic).

• Level 5 (17–20 on each of the two grids): a critical, evaluative argument; sophisticated evaluation of context; evaluating connections between texts.

Open the candidate-answer catalogue for links, reported marks, page references and what to learn from each response.

Pearson is the richest source of marked Dracula essays. All are handwritten scans, read visually and summarised here.

• 2019 report, Q10 menace, Dracula + Dorian Gray, 40/40, candidate response, pp. 88–93 (commentary p. 94). Defines menace through fin-de-siècle fears (the foreign other, sexual deviancy, the New Woman) and the conservative fear of change; three strands, each ending on a difference between the authors – Stoker treats deviance as the menace, Wilde shows society menacing those who deviate. Examiners: context integral, quotations explored for multiple meanings; don’t force prepared points in.

• 2019 Exemplars pack, Script 7, Q10 menace, Dracula + Dorian Gray, 40/40 (20 + 20), pp. 37–40 (commentary p. 64). Pack. Thesis: the true menace is the self. The Count’s courtly welcome is undercut by his eyes; Dorian’s beauty sits against his corruption; both read through the Victorian double. The commentary says the candidate “interpreted the question at a sophisticated level”. Caution: some period “facts” are asserted loosely – use it for structure. Source details.

• 2019 report, Q9 women, Dracula + Beloved, 33/40 (17 + 16), pp. 80–85. On the Level 4/5 border. Its argument (women lack power) is fairly straightforward; what lifts it is many short, integrated, closely analysed quotations and tightly focused comparison. A sharper thesis would lift it further.

• 2019 Exemplars pack, Script 6, Q9 women, Dracula + Dorian Gray, 10 + 11 = 21/40, pp. 32–36 (commentary p. 64). Solid Level 3. The first half is stronger; context stays at the level of typical attitudes to women. Lesson: listing attitudes rather than arguing about them plateaus in the middle.

• 2022 report, Q10 imbalances of power, Dracula + Dorian Gray, 40/40, pp. 144–149 (commentary p. 150). Opens by naming three kinds of imbalance (social, literary, moral). Treats Lucy’s letter about men’s nobility as a stereotype voiced by a character the novel then destroys, and reads Van Helsing’s “man’s brain… woman’s heart” remark about Mina as ironic. Examiners: contexts lead the arguments and range beyond gender.

• 2023 report, Q10 supernatural beings or events, Dracula + Dorian Gray, 40/40, pp. 54–56 (commentary p. 56). Stoker makes evil an external, physical threat to be fought (degeneration, Nordau, Lombroso’s criminal type); Wilde suggests anyone may be corrupted and society may already be rotten. Reads the undead Lucy as demonised female desire, attributed to feminist critics. Examiners: the candidate can “place gothic conventions at the centre of their argument”.

Pearson requires context in every answer, and its examiners want it integral, specific and separate for each text. They reward contexts that lead an argument (degeneration, physiognomy, reverse colonisation, the New Woman) and mark down contexts “added on” or generalised to “the Victorians”. Stoker’s and Wilde’s contexts are not interchangeable. On Paper 2, critical readings should contribute to the assessed argument or relevant context; AO5 is not assessed. Biography is the commonest form of context and the commonest misuse: simplistic biography-to-text links are criticised, and the Stoker-syphilis claim has gone unchallenged in at least one report.

Open the board’s assessment-materials library. The source register records individual reports, mark schemes and access notes. Sources for studying and teaching Dracula.

Return to Chapter C · Past-question catalogue · Candidate answers