Everyone who reads will have favourite characters, memorable figures such as Jay Gatsby, Othello, Miss Havisham, Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, and Elizabeth Bennett, who populate works of literary fiction or drama. Characters are the persons (most frequently) who inhabit fictional worlds, and are understood by readers to have certain moral, intellectual, and emotional qualities, often inferred from what they say and do, and that which motivates them. Through showing and telling, characters may remain stable, or they may change; some, according to E.M. Forster, are flat, whilst others are round.

Beyond theoretical concerns about how characters are crafted in literature, it is important that students of English Language and Literature are able to understand the essence of the characters in the literary works that they study, and to appreciate how they are influenced or induced to behave.

The following activity is simple; it may be used as students first encounter literary characters, or it may be used as a method for revision.

In the activity, students are asked to establish a ‘values profile’ for a literary character or characters, choosing or adding to a list of values that characters advocate or represent. Students are asked to find textual evidence in support of their claims. Finally, students can debate their ideas, testing their assertions against one another.

Sometimes, in teaching, the simple things work best.