What quote says/means/symbolises about a character or theme

Dual purpose. Provides a sense of the town - old and tired. Signals to the reader that the narrator is looking back on her memories of an earlier time and a place that may have changed since the events she's describing

Simplistic and even childish view but it boldly rejects the stratification and segregation which pervades Maycomb

Early chapters show a childish excitement and fear about the mysterious Boo Radley. The children's manufactured fear of Boo is a stand-in for their general fear of the unknown. By the end of the novel the tensions and threats that surround Scout and Jem are very real and knowable. These more real fears make the fear of Boo from earlier summers seem trivial by comparison.

Grudging acceptance is funny. Foreshadows Jem's development over the course of the novel as he will ultimately understand that his view of the legal system was naïve, and his view of the future will become shaped by the bitterness he feels after the Tom Robinson trial.

In this moment Jem recognizes a lesson that Atticus hoped to teach him. Jem realizes that there is value and meaning in fighting for something good even if losing the fight is inevitable. Atticus hopes his children see a similar lesson in his decision to defend Tom Robinson even when the cost is high and there is no chance that the jury will not find Tom guilty.

This act is a betrayal and marks the turning point of Jem as no longer one of the children. He has begun to see the world at least partially as an adult would, and this leads to him having a much more painful experience of the racism and injustice that he encounters. Scout, who continues to see the world as a child would, experiences these difficulties differently.

This line is one of many points in the novel where Jem indicates that he was sure that the jury would find Tom Robinson innocent. Jem is the only character convinced Tom would receive justice. Scout didn’t know what the jury would decide, while all of the adults, including Atticus, knew that the jury would find Tom guilty. The realization that he was so profoundly wrong about the community in which he lives drives the bitterness that haunts Jem for the last chapters of the novel.

Atticus realizes that it must have been Boo Radley who gave the blanket to her, a protective act of kindness that foreshadows the final action of the novel. Boo has already endeared himself to the children by putting gifts in the knothole and sewing Jem’s pants. Figuratively, he turns from a symbol of superstition and fear to one of goodness and purity, becoming something like a guardian angel. This moment with Scout is part of this symbol’s evolution.

Miss Maudie is speaking to Scout and Jem and trying to make them see things from Boo Radley’s perspective. At this early point in the novel, it is very difficult for the Finch children to deal with the unknown. Because they are young and imaginative, they have come up with all sorts of outlandish reasons why Boo might not want to ever leave his home, but Miss Maudie suggests that the reason is much more simple and easy to understand.

These words, spoken at the end of the book, are the only words that Boo Radley speaks in the entire novel. The words capture his character in its entirety. Boo is someone who wants to spend his life within the protective walls of his home. He has ventured out because of a desire to protect the Finch children, but he is not interested in becoming part of society. This request provides Scout her first opportunity to fully interact with Boo as a human being.

Here, Atticus articulates the central lesson he wants to convey to Scout, which is that empathy is the key to understanding others. Atticus presents lessons in empathy several times in relation to Scout’s schoolmates, her teacher, the mob outside the courthouse, and the jury. By the end of the novel, Scout has begun using empathy to understand others. Though Scout still has a lot to learn about the difficulties of society, her final interactions with Boo Radley demonstrate that she has understood Atticus’s “simple trick” and learned to apply it.

Here, Jem asks Atticus how the jury could find Tom Robinson guilty. Atticus’s reply suggests that the racism inherent in the guilty verdict is part of the past, present, and future of the community. Atticus also suggests that only people that the members of the jury won’t feel any remorse about their actions, as children like Jem, who weeps for Tom’s fate, are the only people innocent and unprejudiced enough to recognize the injustice of the verdict. Though this line comes in a quiet scene between father and son, it is one of the most scathing indictments of Maycomb’s culture that Atticus offers.

Atticus knows that by agreeing to defend Tom Robinson he has put himself and his family in line for some unpleasant experiences. Atticus is particularly interested in protecting his children from the ugliness around the trial, and here, he tries to convince Scout to ignore whatever abuse comes her way. Scout tries mightily to obey her father’s advice throughout the novel. Scout’s struggle to behave the way she knows her father wants her to versus her urge to protect her family form one of the conflicts of the novel.

Scout is looking at Bob Ewell during the trial. This scene is one of many places in the novel where the narrator makes it clear that Bob does not have any social standing or value in the Maycomb community, yet the inherent racism of the town privileges Bob over his black neighbors, even though many of them are better people than Bob. Bob’s lack of personal integrity makes him easy to hate as a character, but is also crucial to one of the novel’s arguments about racism. Even though Tom Robinson is objectively a better person than Bob Ewell, Bob can destroy Tom because of the inequities of race.

Here, Sheriff Heck Tate argues that the stabbing death of Bob Ewell is no loss to the community. Heck Tate downplays Bob’s death in part to justify his own desire to cover up Boo Radley’s role in the incident. Additionally, this line has obvious parallels to the story from Chapter 11 of Heck Tate forcing Atticus to kill a mad dog in the street, suggesting that in both situations, a dangerous element has been removed from the community. The line serves as a final underscore to the novel’s premise that Bob Ewell is irredeemably evil.

Bob Ewell speaks these words at the trial, condemning Tom Robinson to prison, and, by extension, to death. The reader may suspect Bob’s words are not true, but the immediate and violent reaction that the statement draws in the courtroom makes it clear that though things did not happen the way that Bob Ewell describes them, his description resonates with the jury and the community to such a great extent that it will cost an innocent man’s life.

The conflict is between white people, with Tom as the unseen, powerless object they're fighting over. Tom is unseen until the day of the trial for two reasons. One is that Scout hasn't seen him, allowing for the big reveal at the trial of Tom's disability, therefore we wonder why Atticus is making such a big deal about Ewell's left handedness. The other reason is because - how real a person does Tom seem before we see him? And how sympathetic does he seem? Getting an idea of Tom only through what people say about him puts us as readers in a similar position to the people of Maycomb in terms of how much knowledge we have about him. It's up to us to make up our own minds about Tom—and about the people who judge him.

Mayella and her father tell the story that everyone expects to hear, about the Tom that is the town's nightmare. The Ewells' Tom is a wicked beast who acts out of animalistic lust. There's no motivation for his sudden attack on Mayella—it's just assumed that any African-American man would rape any white woman, given the chance.

Tom tells the story that no one wants to hear, about the Tom that is himself. Tom presents himself as a good guy who was just trying to help out a fellow human being in need. The only feelings he has for Mayella are compassion and pity, but it seems even those aren't acceptable either. Tom feels sorry for Mayella as one human being for another, but Mr. Gilmer and others can only see a black man feeling sorry for a white woman, suggesting the uncomfortable-for-them idea that white skin doesn't make a person automatically better off than anyone whose skin is black.

Scout at first sees Calpurnia less as a human being than as a force of nature that she runs up against all too often, someone who wins their battles not because she has right on her side, but because she has the might. That's why she totally misinterprets those moments when Calpurnia softens up. Caught up in the tunnel vision of her own perspective, Scout can't see that Calpurnia is hard on her because she cares about her—just as much as Atticus, in her own way.

Everyone in the novel is filtered through Scout's perception. She's the narrator, after all. But we get the sense that Calpurnia in particular is colored by Scout's perspective—and her perspective sounds a little like Cinderella thinking about her wicked stepmother.

Seeing Calpurnia in relation to the African-American community makes Scout realize for the first time that Cal actually continues to exist when she's not at the Finch house. So now Scout is curious, and she peppers Calpurnia with basic questions like when her birthday is (she doesn't actually know, not even the year) and where she grew up (near Finch's Landing).

Miss Maudie uses her sharp tongue to counter meanness rather than to perpetrate it. When Miss Stephanie tries to spread tales of Boo's fearsomeness, Miss Maudie doesn't just refuse to listen, or even just smile and nod and forget. Miss Maudie's joke embarrasses Miss Stephanie into holding her tongue, but perhaps it's effective because it plays off the truth: Miss Stephanie wants to know everyone's intimate secrets, just as if she were sleeping with them.

Jem and Scout count Miss Maudie as a friend because, unlike most adults, she treats them with respect. Just like Atticus, who she says is "the same in his house as he is on the public streets", Miss Maudie acts the same to children as she does to adults: "She had never told on us, had never played cat-and-mouse with us, she was not at all interested in our private lives". While Miss Stephanie is always poking and prying, especially at Scout, and Mrs. Merriweather can't even speak to children in the same tone of voice she uses for grown-ups, Miss Maudie sees the kids as slightly-less-experienced adults, and treats them like that.

She's thanking God for not being born black—but it's a start. Like Atticus's constant advice to Scout to put herself in the other person's shoes, Miss Maudie's respect for others is based on sympathy. Unlike Atticus, she can't be a lawyer or face down a lynch mob (or maybe she could), but her influence is still potent despite being exercised in tea parties rather than courtrooms. And she gives Scout an example of how being a lady doesn't necessarily mean having your selfhood squished—or starched—out of you.

Despite being confined to a wheelchair most of the time, Mrs. Dubose inspires rage and fear just through the power of her words.

For Scout, Mrs. Dubose is a distressing, barely human force that takes over their afternoons after Jem goes crazy on her camellias. It's not until after she dies that Scout and Jem get a sense of what's going on behind the drool and venom: Mrs. Dubose is a morphine addict who had vowed to go clean before she died, and enlisted Jem and Scout (without their knowledge) to keep her off the stuff for longer and longer periods of time. Atticus tells the kids the lesson he hopes they've learned from her.

Even though no one would have blamed Mrs. Dubose if she had wanted to leave this world in narcotic bliss, she decided to try to do what she felt was right, no matter how impossible it seemed or how painful it was.

While Scout accepts Mr. Gilmer's rude treatment of Tom on the witness stand as normal, Dill starts crying uncontrollably when he sees Tom being treated so differently from the white witnesses. He can't quite explain his feelings, but Mr. Raymond can. Dill's sensitivity to Maycomb's intolerance gives Scout (and us) a different model of how to respond to what's happening. The contrast between Dill's angry tears and Scout's justification of Mr. Gilmer's attitude with the surprisingly callous "he's just a N**" suggests that Scout's already been hit with Maycomb's ugly racism stick. Not even being Atticus's daughter has been enough to shield her entirely from her community's prejudices.

While Scout and Jem struggle after the trial to make sense of the Maycomb community that they thought they knew so well, and to figure out their own place in it, Dill takes a more detached approach. Mr. Raymond predicts that Dill will grow out of crying into not caring, however Dill himself comes up with a different path, hiding the tears in laughter. Both responses, however, are difficult for Scout to understand. Dill's character suggests what the limitations of Scout's perspective might be, giving the reader a broader picture of what's the matter with Maycomb through the different limitations of Dill's viewpoint.

Sparked the Civil Rights Movement through an act of non-violent protest; Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white passenger when required to by the laws at the time

Was an African American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968

Had not been passed yet when Lee wrote the novel. The act banned practices in many Southern states to eliminate the black community from voting

This was after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483, on May 17, 1954

Lee highlights that even though individual women can choose not to conform to gender stereotypes, as a whole society needs to shift (such as 1957 Civil Rights Act was when women could finally serve on Federal juries—but much later for some individual states)

In Chapter 27, Link Deas quite rightly tells Bob Ewell to stay away from Helen Robinson as he was intimidating her with foul words. Deas threatens him with the Ladies’ Law—a law that prohibited the use of ‘abusive, insulting, or obscene language’ especially around women—it was punishable by up to $200 in fines!

Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism.

A black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a white male because it implied being socially equal. Obviously, a black male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a white woman, because he risked being accused of rape.

Blacks and whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, whites were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be placed between them.

Under no circumstance was a black male to offer to light the cigarette of a white female -- that gesture implied intimacy.

Blacks were not allowed to show public affection toward one another in public, especially kissing, because it offended whites.

Jim Crow etiquette prescribed that blacks were introduced to whites, never whites to blacks. For example: "Mr. Peters (the white person), this is Charlie (the black person), that I spoke to you about."

Whites did not use courtesy titles of respect when referring to blacks, for example, Mr., Mrs., Miss., Sir, or Ma'am. Instead, blacks were called by their first names. Blacks had to use courtesy titles when referring to whites, and were not allowed to call them by their first names.

If a black person rode in a car driven by a white person, the black person sat in the back seat, or the back of a truck.

Blacks were denied the right to vote by poll taxes (fees charged to poor blacks), white primaries (only Democrats could vote, only whites could be Democrats), and literacy tests ("Name all the Vice Presidents and Supreme Court Justices throughout America's history").

The Jim Crow laws and system of etiquette were undergirded by violence, real and threatened. Blacks who violated Jim Crow norms, for example, drinking from the white water fountain or trying to vote, risked their homes, their jobs, even their lives. Whites could physically beat blacks with impunity. Blacks had little legal recourse against these assaults because the Jim Crow criminal justice system was all-white: police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and prison officials. Violence was instrumental for Jim Crow. It was a method of social control. The most extreme forms of Jim Crow violence were lynchings. Many whites claimed that although lynchings were distasteful, they were necessary supplements to the criminal justice system because blacks were prone to violent crimes, especially the rapes of white women. Arthur Raper investigated nearly a century of lynchings and concluded that approximately one-third of all the victims were falsely accused

Under Jim Crow any and all sexual interactions between black men and white women was illegal, illicit, socially repugnant, and within the Jim Crow definition of rape. Although only 19.2 percent of the lynching victims between 1882 to 1951 were even accused of rape, lynch law was often supported on the popular belief that lynchings were necessary to protect white women from black rapists.

The title of To Kill a Mockingbird has very little literal connection to the plot, but it carries a great deal of symbolic weight in the book. In this story of innocents destroyed by evil, the “mockingbird” comes to represent the idea of innocence. Thus, to kill a mockingbird is to destroy innocence. Throughout the book, a number of characters (Jem, Tom Robinson, Dill, Boo Radley, Mr. Raymond) can be identified as mockingbirds—innocents who have been injured or destroyed through contact with evil. This connection between the novel’s title and its main theme is made explicit several times in the novel: after Tom Robinson is shot, Mr. Underwood compares his death to “the senseless slaughter of songbirds,” and at the end of the book Scout thinks that hurting Boo Radley would be like “shootin’ a mockingbird.” Most important, Miss Maudie explains to Scout: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but . . . sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” That Jem and Scout’s last name is Finch (another type of small bird) indicates that they are particularly vulnerable in the racist world of Maycomb, which often treats the fragile innocence of childhood harshly.

Most of the rest of Maycomb’s residents are dehumanised and seen as a racist mob

Church gives a more multi-faceted sense to the black community

The racism prevalent in that era is not so relevant in this modern society

However, it wouldn’t really be possible to have a black saviour due to the powerlessness of the black race

She never really stands inside Tom Robinson’s shoes the way she stands in Boo’s shoes

She lacks not only the experience but also the vocabulary making it hard for her to understand things from Tom’s perspective

The society she grew up in also aids in her inability to understand the Black race’s perspective

As the novel progresses, the children’s changing attitude toward Boo Radley is an important measurement of their development from innocence toward a grown-up moral perspective. At the beginning of the book, Boo is merely a source of childhood superstition. As he leaves Jem and Scout gifts and mends Jem’s pants, he gradually becomes increasingly and intriguingly real to them. At the end of the novel, he becomes fully human to Scout, illustrating that she has developed into a sympathetic and understanding individual. Boo, an intelligent child ruined by a cruel father, is one of the book’s most important mockingbirds; he is also an important symbol of the good that exists within people. Despite the pain that Boo has suffered, the purity of his heart rules his interaction with the children. In saving Jem and Scout from Bob Ewell, Boo proves the ultimate symbol of good.

The novel doesn’t represent the whole of America but it is very much written from a white perspective

Throughout the novel, front porches appear again and again as a symbol of the liminal space, or transitional space, between the private sphere of the home and the public sphere of the streets of Maycomb. Almost every character’s house is adorned with a front porch, and many of them, such as Miss Maudie, Mrs. Dubose, and Mr. Avery, spend significant amounts of time sitting out on their porches. As a result, the front porch becomes a space where the tensions between personal beliefs and public discourse become particularly evident. Mrs. Dubose publicizes her critical opinion of Atticus from the comfort of her front porch, a group of men, including Mr. Tate and Mr. Deas, question Atticus’s decision to take the case while he stands on his own front porch, and Miss Stephanie spreads gossip about the children’s presence at the trial on Miss Maudie’s front porch. All of these scenarios represent a mixture of opinion and actual events, giving way to a form of public gossip that feels deeply personal. Perhaps the most significant front porch scene occurs in the final chapter of the novel when Scout walks Boo Radley back to his home. She explains to the reader that “just standing on the Radley porch was enough” to learn who he really was, a man who, despite his invisibility, never failed to look out for Jem and Scout. In this instance, the space of the front porch helps Scout decipher the relationship between Boo’s public actions and his private life.

Atticus' sense of justice is challenged following Bob Ewell's death, what is legally right vs what is morally right?

We aren't officially told that Boo Radley killed Bob Ewell, we simply infer from Scout's perspective.

Reversal of role. Boo Radley is described as the child afraid of the dark.

Atticus staying in Jem's room until he woke up shows his unrelenting love.

Unusual power dynamic in a domestic setting between Scout and Calpurnia as a black woman ordering around a white girl

By Chapter 23 when Aunt Alexandra says of Walter, "Because—he—is—trash" (she won’t let Scout play with him). Scout is infuriated but doesn’t realise she is just as bad with her prejudice based upon familial reputation: "…that boy’s not trash, Jem. He ain’t like the Ewells’"

Aunt Alexandra's idea of family is exclusive (kick out those who aren't worthy of being counted in), while Atticus's is inclusive. She arranges family by blood, while Atticus considers affection and loyalty. Basically, it boils down to: do you judge a man (or woman) by his birth—or by his life?

This displays her changing attitudes and also how she is turning into a more accepting individual. THEME: Individual in society

She represents Southern Belle - traditional gender values - imposes these expectations on Scout e.g. clothes

Shows how ahead of his time and exceptional Atticus was as even his sister is still formed by the regional values

"[They] are the product of several generations of gentle breeding"

'if Auntie could be a lady at a time like this, so could I.'

As a reader we develop a sense of sympathy for her as she develops into more of a 3D character by the end of the novel

This is also because she believes Calpurnia has too much weight on the decisions of the family

There are a handful of people in Maycomb who understand the injustice in Maycomb and Atticus is representing them

The Finch kids may have active imaginations, but they're firmly entrenched in the reality of Maycomb. Thanks to Dill's outsider status, he can see the Maycomb community from a different perspective.