Such, Such Were the Joys
"Such, Such Were the Joys" is a long autobiographical essay by English writer George Orwell, probably written in 1946 or 1947 but not published until 1952, after the author's death. It tells the story of Orwell's experiences, between the ages of eight and thirteen in the years leading up to World War I, at St Cyprian's, an exclusive preparatory school for boys in Eastbourne, Sussex.
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Summary and analysis
The title of the essay is taken from the poem "The Echoing Green," contained in William Blake's Songs of Innocence, from 1789:
- Old John, with white hair,
- Does laugh away care,
- Sitting under the oak,
- Among the old folk.
- They laugh at our play,
- And soon they all say,
- "Such, such were the joys
- When we all — girls and boys —
- In our youth-time were seen
- On the echoing Green."
The allusion is never explained in Orwell's text, but it is obviously meant to be grimly ironic, since Orwell recollects his early schooling with almost unrelieved bitterness. St Cyprian's was, according to him, a "world of force and fraud and secrecy," in which the young Orwell, a shy, sickly and unattractive boy surrounded by pupils from families much richer than his own, felt "like a gold-fish" flung "into a tank full of pike."
Orwell attacks the cruelty and snobbery of both his fellow pupils and of his teachers (particularly the headmaster of St Cyprian's, Mr. Vaughan Wilkes, nicknamed "Sambo," and his wife, nicknamed "Flip"). He also describes the education he received there as "a preparation for a sort of confidence trick," geared entirely towards maximizing his future performance in the admissions exams to leading English public schools such as Eton and Harrow, without any concern for actual knowledge or understanding.
In the essay, Orwell makes many arresting observations about the contradictions of the Edwardian middle and upper class world-view, about the psychology of children, and about the experience of oppression and class-conflict that shaped his later left-wing political views. Several biographers have argued convincingly that "Such, Such Were the Joys" significantly exaggerates Orwell's suffering at St Cyprian's, as well as the extent of the abuse to which he was subjected, but the essay is unquestionably one of the most interesting and effective of his autobiographical writings. It also ranks high in the canon of boarding school literature.
According to Orwell's correspondence, he wrote the essay partly as a response to the publication in 1938 of the Enemies of Promise, an autobiographical work by Cyril Connolly, who had been Orwell's classmate and friend at St Cyprian's and later at Eton. Connolly's recollections of St Cyprian's are significantly less negative than Orwell's. "Such, Such Were the Joys" was considered so libelous that is was not published until after Orwell's death. It first appeared in 1952 in the Partisan Review, with the names of the individuals altered and the school identified only as "Crossgates."
See also
Quotes
- I knew the bed-wetting was (a) wicked and (b) outside my control. The second fact I was personally aware of, and the first I did not question. It was possible, therefore, to commit a sin without knowing that you committed it, without wanting to commit it, and without being able to avoid it. Sin was not necessarily something that you did: it might be something that happened to you [... This] was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good. And the double beating was a turning-point, for it brought home to me for the first time the harshness of the environment into which I had been flung [... As] I sat snivelling on the edge of a chair in Sambo's study, with not even the self-possession to stand up while he stormed at me, I had a conviction of sin and folly and weakness, such as I do not remember to have felt before.
- The various codes which were presented to you at St Cyprian's — religious, moral, social and intellectual — contradicted one another if you worked out their implications. The essential conflict was between the tradition of nineteenth-century asceticism and the actually existing luxury and snobbery of the pre-1914 age. On the one side were low-church Bible Christianity, sex puritanism, insistence on hard work, respect for academic distinction, disapproval of self-indulgence: on the other, contempt for 'braininess,' and worship of games, contempt for foreigners and the working class, an almost neurotic dread of poverty and, above all, the assumption not only that money and privilege are the things that matter, but that it is better to inherit them than to have to work for them. Broadly, you were bidden to be at once a Christian and a social success, which is impossible.
- That was the pattern of school life — a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak. Virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people — in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.
- If I had to pass through Eastbourne I would not make a detour to avoid the school: and if I happened to pass the school itself I might even stop for a moment by the low brick wall, with the steep bank running down from it, and look across the flat playing field at the ugly building with the square of asphalt in front of it. And if I went inside and smelt again the inky, dusty smell of the big schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in myself! But it is a fact that for many years I could hardly have borne to look at it again [...] Now, however, the place is out of my system for good. Its magic works no longer, and I have not even enough animosity left to make me hope that Flip and Sambo are dead or that the story of the school being burnt down was true.