Through the discovery of the first chapter, we will understand the main elements of the plot: who are the characters, what is Maycomb? What type of atmosphere is shown through Harper Lee's words.
The novel begins with Scout remembering the events that led to his brother, Jem, breaking his arm when he was around 13 years old. She gives the readers a background of her family which is a very long line of southerners that trace their origin from a fur trader called Simon Finch from Cornwall, England. She narrates how Finch moved up the Alabama River after crossing the Atlantic and settled in Finch's Landing, 40 miles above Saint Stephens, Alabama, where her father Atticus and his two siblings were raised.
Scout then recounts back to present day Maycomb, Alabama, where she lives with her father who is widowed, ten-year-old Jem and their family cook Calpurnia. It is summertime, and there is a lot to do so six year old Scout, and Jem play around the house, but not further than the boundaries Calpurnia has forbidden them not to roam past. Their neighborhood is introduced here, including the Radley Place. The Radleys, living three doors down from Finch home, had a younger boy named Arthur (Boo) who got involved with the wrong crowd and got sentenced to a state school. His father Mr. Radley asked the judge to release Boo into his custody and placed him under house arrest for 15 years.
One day Boo stabbed Mr. Radley in the leg with scissors, and he stormed out of the house shouting that Boo was hell bent on killing them. The police were called and found Boo working on his scrapbook and locked him away in a courtroom basement. He was later released back into house arrest, and when Mr. Radley died, his older son Nathan came back home from Florida to keep Boo under house arrest. For years the stories about Boo and Radley became more exaggerated, but the people of Maycomb remained scared of the Radleys. Boo was claimed to roam at night, crimes all over town were attributed to Boo, plants that died from the cold were said to have been breathed on by Boo, and pecans which fell from Radley trees were deemed as poisonous. When Jem and Scout meet Charles Baker Harris (Dill), who moved next door with his aunt Rachel Haverford, he becomes interested in the stories, strikes an instant friendship with the two brothers and makes a planned attempt and lures Boo out of the house.
As September sets in, Dill leaves Maycomb for Meridian, Mississippi, just before Jem and Scout started school. Scout is excited to begin first grade, since she has been watching other kids go to school from her treehouse. However, her first day was not as good as she expected. Her teacher, Miss Caroline Fisher, gets frustrated when she realizes that she is so enthusiastic about reading and writing, and tells her that her father should stop teaching her because he doesn't know how to teach. Miss Fisher is new to Maycomb and hence doesn't understand the social structure of the town, and she awkwardly confronts a student named Walter Cunningham who comes from a very poor family. She offers to buy him lunch because he didn't carry any, but Walter says he has no means of paying her back and Scout explains that the Cunninghams don't take what they can't pay back. Although she meant well, the teacher sends Scout to stand in a corner, confusing her further on what she thought was a helpful interruption.
In this section, you can find the pages of the lesson extracted from the textbook "My English Class Première LLCE"
