Edexcel GCSE English Literature set texts 2026 to 2027

Pearson Edexcel's GCSE English Literature (1ET0) sets a Shakespeare play, a post-1914 British play or novel and a nineteenth-century novel, plus poetry from its anthology. Its list overlaps with AQA's on the Victorian novels and on Priestley, Russell, Orwell and Golding, and adds Twelfth Night, Hobson's Choice, Journey's End, The Empress and Silas Marner.

For the collector the interesting rows are the twentieth-century plays. Journey's End was published by Gollancz in 1929 after its first London run, An Inspector Calls by Heinemann in 1947, Blood Brothers in Samuel French's acting edition, and all three are modest books in first edition, cheap enough to collect from the set-text list you were taught. The novels are the expensive end: a first edition of Silas Marner (Blackwood, 1861, three volumes) or Frankenstein (Lackington, 1818, three volumes, anonymous) is a serious purchase, while Animal Farm (Secker and Warburg, 1945, in its jacket) and Lord of the Flies (Faber, 1954) are the twentieth-century firsts most often found in the wild and most often mis-described.

Each row links to the book's page, where the first edition is identified against two sources, its points are listed, and values appear once we hold recorded sales of that printing. A school copy of any of these is a reprint worth a few pounds; the pages explain what the first printing looks like instead.