Brave New World: Context

Two lecture-style lessons for A Level on the context of Brave New World, with the first looking at life at the time, and the second moving onto life since.
Across these two lessons, designed for when pupils have already read the book, a range of ideas about historical context are considered. The first looks at what was going on at the time when Huxley was writing, considering mass production, eugenics, and conditioning, whereas the second moves into considering how we have started to move towards that world in the 90 years since Huxley wrote the novel: changes in technology and what it means to be human.
Knowledge of context (both when the text was written and has been received) is imperative at A Level and I’ve found both of these lessons have really helped my pupils to get a good grounding in what they need to know.