Sodden with self-pity, Orwell's account of his prep school years is fascinating but not to be trusted. It tells us more about the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four than the effects – good and bad – of an expensive private education
Pupils at Eton college. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
There are two St Cyprians. One is a martyr of the early church – a third-century bishop of Carthage who was put to death in AD258 by a proconsul of the emperor Valerian after refusing to pay obeisance to the pagan gods. The other, now regarded by scholars as a mythological figure and expunged from the Vatican's martyrology, was Saint Cyprian of Antioch. According to legend, he was a pagan sorcerer who converted to Christianity but secretly carried on with his magical practices. He is regarded as the patron saint of necromancers.
We can safely assume that it was the first Saint Cyprian – patron saint of North Africa, by the way – after whom the Eastbourne prep school the young Eric Blair attended was named. But from his account of his time there before and during the first world war – published many years later when he was better known as George Orwell – you'd be forgiven for imagining that it was the second saint.
The title of the long essay "Such, Such Were the Joys" – taken from Blake's rhapsodic Song of Innocence "On the Echoing Green" – is bitterly ironic. Orwell hated his time at prep school – or, at least, seemed to have decided that he hated it by the time he came to recall it in print. "Whoever writes about his childhood," he says, "must beware of exaggeration and self-pity. I do not claim that I was a martyr, or that St Cyprian's was a sort of Dotheboys Hall." Disclaimer issued, he does exactly that, in a performance of grotesque literary effectiveness.
More.
We can safely assume that it was the first Saint Cyprian – patron saint of North Africa, by the way – after whom the Eastbourne prep school the young Eric Blair attended was named. But from his account of his time there before and during the first world war – published many years later when he was better known as George Orwell – you'd be forgiven for imagining that it was the second saint.The title of the long essay "Such, Such Were the Joys" – taken from Blake's rhapsodic Song of Innocence "On the Echoing Green" – is bitterly ironic. Orwell hated his time at prep school – or, at least, seemed to have decided that he hated it by the time he came to recall it in print. "Whoever writes about his childhood," he says, "must beware of exaggeration and self-pity. I do not claim that I was a martyr, or that St Cyprian's was a sort of Dotheboys Hall." Disclaimer issued, he does exactly that, in a performance of grotesque literary effectiveness.
More.
No comments:
Post a Comment