Such Were the Joys

Breaking Big Brother - Chapter 3

This is the third chapter of my book Breaking Big Brother, which will be published in installments here on Thinking Man. To read from the beginning, click here.

We’ve come a decent way in our Orwellian journey. Climbed the first hill, jumped over the first hurdle. Choose whatever metaphor you’d like. We know why George Orwell was interested in politics, and we know the political cause that he supported.

Now we will examine why—something that we touched on briefly in Chapter Two, but which can only really be understood if we consider the man behind the writing.

Thus, let’s consider this the official beginning of Part II of Breaking Big Brother, which we will tentatively name “The Obligatory Biographical Section.”

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George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 in Motihari, India.

A variant of this sentence has undoubtedly introduced at least a quarter of all Orwell biographies in existence. If it weren’t so ubiquitous as to render the original author of this sentence completely unknown, it would feel like plagiarism.

However, despite its popularity, the sentence packs a decent punch. It tells us that the name George Orwell is a pseudonym, for one, which already tells us a great deal about Eric Blair’s character.

The year he was born is also important. During this period in history, Europe was in flux. Britain’s unbridled prosperity and years of relative peace were ended by the First World War, which started when Blair was eleven years old and ended when he was fifteen. Britain was declining as a global superpower, and new, more efficient governments were dominating the international landscape. All around was this general feeling that things were getting worse, coupled by a willful ignorance among some members of the upper echelons of society towards any possible change.

The place Blair was born was equally important. Although he spent virtually his entire childhood in England (the Blairs moved back to England in 1904), when Eric Blair was born, his father was working as a civil servant in British Colonial India, overseeing the production of opium which would eventually be sold to China.

His family was what he described as “lower-upper-middle-class.” Although they never had much money, they had status (his great-great grandfather was an English plantation owner and ‘country gentleman’), and the English class system was divided along occupational rather than monetary lines. Orwell explains what this was like in detail in The Road to Wigan Pier:

“People in this class owned no land, but they felt that they were landowners in the sight of God and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook by going into the professions and the fighting services rather than into trade…
To belong to this class when you were at the £400 a year level was a queer business, for it meant that your gentility was almost purely theoretical. You lived, so to speak, at two levels simultaneously. Theoretically you knew all about servants and how to tip them, although in practice you had one, at most, two resident servants. Theoretically you knew how to wear your clothes and how to order a dinner, although in practice you could never afford to go to a decent tailor or a decent restaurant. Theoretically you knew how to shoot and ride, although in practice you had no horses to ride and not an inch of ground to shoot over. It was this that explained the attraction of India (more recently Kenya, Nigeria, etc.) for the lower-upper-middle class. The people who went there as soldiers and officials did not go there to make money, for a soldier or an official does not want money; they went there because in India, with cheap horses, free shooting, and hordes of black servants, it was so easy to play at being a gentleman.”

In other words, Blair was suspended between two worlds. He understood the upper class. He learned the same things, evolved the same prejudices, attended the same schools. However, he was never truly one of them.

Orwell was highly intelligent, and as such, he had access to the finest education. He attended Eton, a famed British ‘public school’ that boasts alumni from the highest levels of the British aristocracy. Before this, young Eric Blair attended St. Cyprian’s, an all-boys preparatory boarding school whose main function was to groom its pupils to eventually attend fancy public schools such as Eton.

There was a blatant caste system in place at this school, and Blair was at the absolute bottom. He was there on a scholarship; his parents would not have been able to afford the tuition otherwise. He was beaten often (something which wealthier students were spared), and was habitually excluded from activities because “his parents couldn’t afford them.” The headmaster and his wife, nicknamed “Sambo” and “Flip,” would often remind him that he was attending St. Cyprian’s on their dime. He described the feeling that this left him with as follows:

“A child accepts the codes of behaviour that are presented to it, even when it breaks them. From the age of eight or even earlier, the consciousness of sin was never far away from me. If I contrived to seem callous and defiant, it was only a thin cover over a mass of shame and dismay. All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude — and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.” (-George Orwell, “Such, Such Were the Joys”)

His last point is the most interesting to me. He reiterated this fact more than once in “Such, Such Were the Joys”:

“It was possible, therefore, to commmit 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.”

It sounds an awful like the state of affairs in Nineteen Eighty-Four, doesn’t it?

Sex was prohibited at these schools and homosexuality, while taboo, was relatively commonplace (this undoubtedly caused Orwell to go through his life a self-proclaimed prude when it came to sexual matters). There were ‘thought police,’ (i.e. Flip and Sambo). There was a clearly delineated, externally-enforced caste system.

I’m sure some of this has to do with the fact that a school is a microcosm of a society—there are people of all kinds filling a myriad of roles, some more fortunate than others and all just trying to survive. And just like the Winston Smith of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Eric Arthur Blair did not fit neatly within any of ‘boxes’ that were delineated for him.

Despite his rank at the bottom of the social hierarchy, young Eric Blair was not without friends. He managed to find a social circle in both Eton and St. Cyprian’s, often with people of a higher social class than his own. One of these friends was the writer Cyril Connelly, who he attended both schools with and would stay in touch with throughout his life.

In 1938, Cyril Connelly published the book Enemies of Promise, a work of literary criticism which contained an autobiographical section detailing his time in school. In the book, Connelly described Orwell as follows:

“I had two friends whose “favour” was as uncertain as my own, George Orwell, and Cecil Beaton. I was a stage rebel, Orwell a true one. Tall, pale, with his flaccid cheeks, large spatulate fingers, and supercilious voice, he was one of those boys who seem born old. He was incapable of courtship and when his favour went it sank for ever. He saw through [St. Cyprian’s], despised Sambo and hated Flip but was invaluable to them as scholarship fodder.”

Clearly, Orwell adopted his rebellious spirit early, and seemed to retain it throughout his time at Eton (Connelly described Eton-aged Orwell as “rather extreme and aloof”).

At first, Cyril Connelly’s account of his time at Eton appears to be just as brutal as his St. Cyprian’s. For example, the boys had to undergo ‘fagging’ upon their arrival at Eton, a ritual in which they were forced to be personal servants for the upperclassmen. Despite this, the whole experience seemed on the whole much more ‘democratic’ than his preparatory school days. Underclassmen were treated poorly, but this was the same for all underclassmen, rich and poor alike.

Furthermore, apart from the “Dark Ages” in which he was mistreated and bullied (i.e. his first year or two of schooling), Connelly seemed to look back on his time at Eton positively. The school fostered a culture of genuine curiosity. The students there admired pre-Raphaelite art (the style that was ‘in vogue’ at the time) and idolized ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Socrates. He had some complaints about the school (e.g. their use of corporal punishment), but as a whole, Connelly liked Eton.

By contrast, Orwell’s opinion of the school seemed to be one of indifference. In “Such, Such Were the Joys,” Orwell didn’t speak much about his time at Eton, except to say that he liked it a great deal better than his time at St. Cyprian’s. However, his rebellious spirit must have continued, because after leaving Eton, instead of going to college (the path that was laid out for him since he was a young boy at St. Cyprian’s), he decided to go to Burma to become an Imperial Police Officer.

Was this decision motivated by a desire to experience a taste of the ‘good life’? Perhaps. Or maybe this was simply Orwell’s independent spirit. He was a “true rebel,” after all, and he’d been that way his entire life.

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As always, if you’d like to correct any errors or add on to anything I’ve said, feel free to do so in the comments.

Thank you so much for reading.

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Chapter Four: