I enjoy reading essays and articles, and so I’ve decided to write about them on my blog. Apart from the fact that they interest me, one of my criteria for selection is that they are available online or through a
State Library library card.
Available online at: George Orwell: Such, Such Were the Joys published in Partisan Review Sept-October 1952.
I became aware of this essay through a Guardian article by Zoe Williams commenting on British broadcaster Kirstie Allsopp’s social media post about allowing her 15-year old son to go Interrailing in Europe by himself. Being on the other side of the world, I am of course unaware of the debate and the personalities and their social class, but I was attracted to Williams’ reflection on the child-rearing habits of “the posh” and her reference to George Orwell’s essay. I started reading it, and was transfixed by the honesty of Orwell’s essay, the bleakness of the boarding-school experience he describes, and the links Orwell draws between power, resistance and the British class system.
St Cyprian’s School was founded in 1899 on the Muscular Christianity principles of ‘character development’. As a prep school, its reputation rested on its success in getting its students into public schools like Eton and Harrow. It provided scholarships for ‘deserving cases’ which is how Orwell got to attend, and was never allowed to forget that his parents couldn’t afford such an education. And what an education it was: bullying, cramming to pass the entrance exams, corporal punishment, obsession over ‘beastliness’ (masturbation) and the minute gradations of class of which all students were acutely aware. The British Boarding School story is familiar to Australians of my age through the books we read as children, and books and films like Tom Brown’s Schooldays but Orwell’s first-person, perceptive account is compelling reading.
Orwell was aware that his account was too libelous to be published while the people he describes were still alive, particularly the headmistress Mrs Wilkes (whom the students called ‘Mum’ as a contraction of ‘Ma’am’ rather than any sense of affection). As a result, the essay was not published until 1952 some five years after it was thought to be written, and then only in America with the name of the school changed: it was not published in UK until 1968. Of course, old boys leapt to St Cyprian’s defence, rebutting Orwell’s portrayal.
You can see a photograph of St Cyprian’s as Orwell knew it, before it burned down in 1939 here.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 
I’m reading a bio about Orwell atm and he has just finished his schooling at St Cyprian’s School. There was some discussion about the way Orwell chose to remember events from his childhood which suggested that his time at the school was not as awful all of the time as he remembered it later on.
So I have this one on my list to read at some point.
Taylor summed it up by saying ‘the suspicion is that, again, Orwell is constructing a myth around himself, using select materials from his schooldays to fashion as image that chimes with the kind of person he imagined himself to be…’
But he also went on to say that the authoritarian nature of the school and its use of ‘tightly invigiliated classrooms’ informed 1984.