Such, Such Were The Joys - Summary and Analysis

Summary and Analysis

The title of the essay is taken from "The Echoing Green," one of William Blake's Songs of Innocence which Orwell's mother had read to him when they lived at Henley:

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 grimly ironic, since Orwell recollects his early boarding school experiences with unvarnished realism. 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, was "like a goldfish" thrown "into a tank full of pike." The piece fiercely attacks the cruelty and snobbery of both his fellow pupils and of his teachers (particularly the headmaster, Mr. Vaughan Wilkes, nicknamed "Sambo," and his wife Cicely, nicknamed "Flip").

Orwell describes the education he received 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. Orwell also claims that he was accepted as a boarder at St Cyprians –at half of the usual fees– so that he might earn a scholarship that would look good in the school's publicity, and that his training relied heavily on the use of beatings, while the rich boys received preferential treatment and were exempted from corporal punishment.

The essay lashes out at the hypocrisy of the Edwardian society in which Orwell grew up and in which a boy was "bidden to be at once a Christian and a social success, which is impossible." A chapter is devoted to the puritanical attitudes towards sex at the time and to the frightful consequences of the discovery of what appears to have been a case of mutual masturbation among a group of boys at the school. On the other hand, Orwell describes the actual "pattern of school life" as

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.

Orwell's story is also punctuated by anecdotes about the dirt and squalor surrounding him, such as the porridge at the dining hall containing "more lumps, hairs and unexplained black things than one would have thought possible, unless someone were putting them there on purpose," a human turd floating in the Devonshire Baths, and a new boy's teeth turning green because of neglect.

According to the essay, the main lesson that Orwell took away from St Cyprian's was that, for a "weak" and "inferior" person such as himself, "to survive, or at least to preserve any kind of independence, was essentially criminal, since it meant breaking rules which you yourself recognized," and that he lived in a world "where it was not possible to be good." In the piece, Orwell also seeks to illustrate the reflection that children live "in a sort of alien under-water world which we can only penetrate by memory or divination," and he wonders whether even in more modern times, without "God, Latin, the cane, class distinctions and sexual taboos," it might still be normal for schoolchildren to "live for years amid irrational terrors and lunatic misunderstandings."