I'm the King of the Castle: Themes (Cambridge (CIE) IGCSE English Literature): Revision Note

The highest level of marks in exams are often linked to answers that demonstrate critical thinking around ideas and themes. Exploring the themes of a text in relation to the question being asked will help to increase the examiner’s confidence in your ability to write assuredly about the text, and the writer’s intentions behind their choices.

Below are some of the themes that could be explored in I’m the King of the Castle. This list is not exhaustive, and you are encouraged to identify other themes or ideas within the text:

• Isolation and loneliness 

• Lack of love 

• Power and class 

• Childhood cruelty and fear

• Death

Isolation and loneliness

In the book’s afterword, author Susan Hill says the book is “most of all” about isolation and the lack of love. Symbolically Warings, the house where the novel is set, is in an isolated position “some distance from any other house” and the nearest village, Derne, had itself shrunk and become quieter as people left for the towns. The woods surrounding the house also add to the feeling of it being cut off. In addition, four of the book’s five main characters: Edmund, Charles, Mr Hooper and Mrs Kingshaw, have experienced or continue to experience loneliness and being alone and this, at times, influences their decision-making 

Knowledge and evidence

• When the book starts, we are told that Mr Hooper is a widower and is intent on bringing a housekeeper to Warings with a companion for his son Edmund 

• When the new housekeeper, Mrs Kingshaw, arrives we learn that she also is widowed and had been, for some years past, “much” alone 

• Edmund seems to prefer isolation:

  • He wondered, without success, if he ought to feel his mother’s absence 

  • He resents the arrival of the new housekeeper’s son, Charles 

  • There were many things to do and he wanted to do them alone 

• Charles feels he must prove to himself that he can get by “alone in this place”: 

  • But when he is attacked by a bird, he feels his own extreme isolation in the cornfield 

• As Edmund’s “reign of terror” against Charles continues, Charles is at some points isolated physically: 

  • He is locked in the Red Room where the display of dead moths is kept 

  • He is locked in a shed by Edmund who taunts him about what might be in there with him 

• Generally, Charles prefers to be alone, such as when he finds a remote room in the house where he can make his models:

  • He liked being alone because he was used to it 

  • He like to keep things inside himself 

  • It also kept him out of the reach of Edmund 

  • At times he craves the isolation of the woods 

• Charles also feels very much alone because the parents seem much more ready to accept Edmund’s version of events than his 

• He dreads the isolation he will feel when he is moved to Edmund’s school where he will be at Edmund’s mercy:

• But when Edmund falls from the castle wall, Charles, thinking him dead, thinks thing may turn out okay when he is alone 

• Mr Hooper, meanwhile, is getting used to having a woman around again: 

  • Mrs Kingshaw thinks that she has missed a man, considering herself a woman who does not cope easily alone 

  • Later, contemplating married life, Mrs Kingshaw reflects that she will no longer be a struggling, lonely woman 

• It is arguably the sense of isolation, emotional as much as physical, together with fear of the future that forces Charles to commit suicide 

What is the writer’s intention? 

• Hill uses isolation and loneliness to explain the actions of the adults: 

  • They both crave companionship, but for different reasons 

  • Mr Hooper wants a physical relationship, whereas Mrs Kingshaw is seeking security, family life and an improved social status 

• Charles’ isolation is outlined as being as much psychological as physical:

  • He doesn’t feel close to his mother because he feels she doesn’t understand him or listen to him 

  • His many fears and securities make him feel alone in facing the world 

• The boys are boarding school pupils, which the author uses to reinforce the distance, physical and emotional, that lies between them and their remaining parents: 

  • The lack of communication between the boys and the parents isolates them even when they are together 

• Charles craves isolation because it makes him feel safe, but at times he is at his most scared when he is alone, such as when Edmund locks him in a room 

• Edmund, though, is characterised right from the start of the book as a boy who wants to be left alone to his own devices but, ironically, he seems happiest when he has a victim to “torture” in the shape of Charles

• Finally, the author uses the remoteness of the house and the woods surrounding it as symbolic of the characters' isolation 

Lack of love

It’s hard to find love in this book, as the author admits in the afterword in which she cites lack of love as one of its main themes. Susan Hill makes an exception of Fielding, who has positive qualities because he has “known normal human love, given and received, and taken it quite for granted, as all happy, young creatures do.” 

Knowledge and evidence

• When trying to fathom what is going on in his son’s mind. Mr Hooper reflects that at the same age he had loathed his own father 

• Neither parent mentions love in relation to their deceased partners, their children or each other 

• Nor do the children mention love in relation to their parents, alive or dead: 

  • When Edmund boasts to Charles about the Christmas presents he will receive from his father, he says it is because he is the most important thing in his father’s life, not because he loves him 

  • Charles, at points in the book, talks about his hatred for Edmund and for the way his mother is with Mr Hooper 

What is the writer’s intention? 

• Clearly, as indicated in her afterword to the book, the author is keen to attribute the characters’ motives and actions to a lack of love, especially in childhood: 

  • Mr Hooper did not have a loving father and that, in turn, makes it impossible to show love to his own son 

  • Mrs Kingshaw’s lack of love for her son is demonstrated by the way she neglects his feelings and fails to understand his concerns  

  • We might be expected understand that Edmund’s extreme cruelty is a direct result of a lack of parental love 

• The loving household which Fielding comes from forges his own open, caring and honest personality, and is used as a device to contrast sharply with the lack of love on view in Mr Hooper’s household

Power and class

Power and class are inextricably linked in this book. Mr Hooper is a wealthy property owner, while Mrs Kingshaw is forced to move around, taking jobs where she can and finding temporary lodgings. Both boys are aware of their circumstances and their place on the social ladder, and this is used by Edmund as ammunition when bullying Charles. The relationship between Mr Hooper and Mrs Kingshaw is based on him having the power to give her a better life and she having the power to attract him.

Knowledge and evidence

• Aware of his circumstances, Mr Hooper is “acquiring a dynastic sense” in middle age and believes being able to talk about the newly inherited Warings, his place in the country, will lend him importance:

  • While Edmund doesn’t like the house, the idea of a family history pleased him 

• When Edmund first meets Charles and is immediately antagonistic towards him, he is thinking the Hoopers belong here, whereas the Kingshaws have nothing:

  • Edmund stresses to Charles that when his father dies, the house will be his 

  • He looks down on Charles for being a tenant and asks him why his father didn’t buy him a proper house 

• The power battle briefly becomes physical when the boys fight 

• Later in the book, Mr Hooper muses on developing his power base by making contact with his country neighbours and consolidating his position in the area 

• While gaining power and control over Charles in numerous ways, often by playing on his fears and insecurities, Edmund also returns to their class differences: 

  • He tells him that Warings is not his place and he is only there because his mother is in their employ 

  • He calls her a servant who has to answer to his father and that, by extension, Charles should answer to him 

  • Mrs Kingshaw tells Charles that he must be polite to Mr Hooper because it is his house 

• Charles briefly gains control when Edmund becomes hysterical when they are lost in the woods: 

  • He felt overwhelmingly strong and powerful 

• Later, Edmund tells Charles his mother has “gone after” his father because he is rich: 

  • Charles reflects on his family’s difficult financial situation since his father’s death 

  • Although a boarding school pupil, he is only there as a Governor’s Bequest Boy which means he doesn’t have to pay fees 

  • In future, he will be attending the same school as Edmund with Mr Hooper paying his fees 

  • But Edmund would have power over him there too as Head of Dorm 

• When Charles meets the farm boy Fielding, he is shocked because their relationship is based on giving and sharing, and not on power 

• The power in the relationship between Mr Hooper and Mrs Kingshaw starts to shift towards the end of the book when she manipulates him into proposing to her by suggesting she had not made up her mind about her future 

What is the writer’s intention? 

• Class divides the characters in this novel into different groups: those with power and those without 

• But subtleties Hill’s writing show how this can shift at times:

  • On a couple of occasions, Charles gains power over Edmund and becomes the “King of the Castle”

• Mrs Kingshaw, powerless in terms of financial security and property ownership, uses Mr Hooper’s attraction to her to manipulate him into a marriage proposal

• But ultimately it is the character with least power, Charles, who ends up as the victim in the book, suggesting the author's central message is about despair rather than hope

Childhood cruelty and fear

Childhood cruelty is the most dramatic theme in the book, with the author describing Edmund as evil in her afterword. He is an expert at playing on Charles’ fears and insecurities, and appears to have a complete lack of compassion. It should be said that his cruelty, which is largely psychological, suggests a child who is sadistic and skillful in choosing words and actions that will hurt. At the other extreme is Charles’ fear, which appears to be widespread and all-consuming.

Knowledge and evidence

• Edmund cruelly challenges Charles about his late father being a Battle of Britain pilot when they first meet 

• Charles is scared when attacked by a crow in the cornfield:

  • Edmund observes this and teases him about it, and later leaves a dead, stuffed crow on Charles’ bed 

• He challenges Charles to look around the Red Room, instinctively knowing Charles will be fearful of the dead moth collection: 

  • When he does enter the room, Edmund locks him in 

  • Charles is terrified and this terror increases when a live moth flutters around the room 

• Charles remembers other occasions when he had been frightened: 

  • He recalls being bullied at school and being challenged to jump into a swimming pool 

  • He remembers an elderly lady guest at a hotel he was staying in who frightened him; no reason is given for this 

• A superstitious boy, he fears a wart on his hand is the result of a black magic experiment at school and, later, that Edmund’s survival from a castle wall fall was because he had wished him dead 

• Edmund, in his turn, reveals fears of being lost in the woods, of a loud thunderstorm and of climbing the castle walls 

• But Charles reflects that Edmund’s fear was a response to an outside situation, whereas his was quite different and Edmund had the measure of it 

• He thinks Edmund’s cruelty is unpredictable, clever and inventive:

  • Edmund is cruel to Charles by lying about him to their parents, saying he attacked him in the woods and, later, pushed him off the castle wall 

  • When Edmund locks Charles in the shed, he displays sadistic tendencies by saying that perhaps he did it just because he felt like it 

• Ultimately, it is Charles’ fears about what Edmund will do to him in the future, both at home and at school, combined with fear of what life will be like for him when his mother marries Mr Hooper, that convinces him to take his own life 

• Edmund reveals his cruelty is beyond redemption when Charles’ body is discovered:

  • He feels a “spurt of triumph” that he has caused Charles to do it 

What is the writer’s intention? 

• In the book’s afterword, Susan Hill says she refutes claims that Charles’ suicide was unlikely:

  • She says it is a novel about cruelty and about the power of evil, which can possess even a young child 

  • She says that re-reading the novel, she still thinks the ending was inevitable, because Charles saw no other solution 

• Hill’s intention, then, was to demonstrate that extreme, even pathological, cruelty, when combined with heightened fear, is an equation that can result in the ultimate extreme conclusion: death by suicide:

  • To make this reasonable, she has created in Edmund a boy who has no redeeming qualities and, in Charles, a boy who is frightened by his own shadow 

• Hill is also keen to highlight that our environment shapes us, and this is most obviously the case in unloved children 

Death

Death is a key theme of the book. It starts and ends the novel, with Edmund’s grandfather being on his deathbed at the start, and Charles’ suicide taking place at the end. Both boys have a dead parent and both parents have a dead partner. The novel is full of images of death, from the dead moth collection and the dead, stuffed crow, to a lamb being led to slaughter and the boys finding a dead rabbit in the woods. 

Knowledge and evidence 

• Seeing his grandfather on his deathbed, Edmund thinks he looks like one of the dead old moths he collected 

• The nearby village of Derne appears to be dying as people have left for the towns and there have been few newcomers or new buildings 

• Edmund is taken to see his grandfather’s dead moth collection and crumbles one specimen into dust:

  • Charles is terrified when Edmund locks him in the Red Room with the dead moth collection 

• When the boys meet, Edmund questions the truth of Charles’ dead father being a Battle of Britain pilot 

• Mr Hooper blames his wife for dying without setting him a set of parenting rules to follow 

• Edmund is attacked by a crow when out exploring: 

  • Playing on his fears, Edmund leaves a dead, stuffed crow on Charles’ bed 

  • Crows are often seen as a symbol of death  

• The boys also find a “maggoty” dead rabbit in the woods 

• Edmund asked Charles if he saw his father’s dead body: 

  • When Charles says no, Edmund tells him he saw his grandfather’s body after he had died 

  • He says dead things, including people, are finished and don’t matter 

• When Edmund falls from the ruined castle’s wall, Charles thinks he is dead 

• Charles meets his new friend and his farmer father as they are taking a calf to market: 

  • The calf will be slaughtered for veal meat 

• When the boys are taken to a circus, Charles is terrified and imagines the canvas falling down and bodies piling up 

• The book’s final image is of Charles’ body upside down in the water after he drowns himself 

What is the writer’s intention? 

• It is possible to interpret all of the death in the book being a pathway to the ultimate death: Charles’ suicide 

• Certainly the imagery adds to the sense of foreboding, to Charles’ fears and provides signposts towards the book’s conclusion 

• Much of the imagery of death is linked to nature, in the shape of dead birds, moths, rabbits and fish 

• Charles’ body is found in a natural setting and it might be possible to conclude that the author is making a point both about the cruelty of nature and the natural cycle of life and death 

Source

Hill, S. (1970) I’m the King of the Castle. 1989 edn. Penguin.