How do I answer a question on an unseen nineteenth-century prose passage?

The key to doing well in unseen prose analysis is practice and context. Research of societal and literary context in a specific time period and collecting simple facts help to add evidence to your analysis, and can aid your response by taking stereotypes or literary conventions into consideration as you read over a passage. Coming up with memory aids of literary techniques (similes, metaphors, imagery) can contribute towards a clear and expansive analysis, and asking what the impact of these techniques are on the reader shows a conscious answering of any analytical question. Taking passages out of well-known nineteenth-century texts and reading them first and taking a few minutes to annotate or highlight key parts of the text allows you to pull out parts that add to your contextual information, resulting in an insightful and informative analysis of such a text.