In the first episode of the BBC documentary series, Radley College (1980), there is a telling scene. It comes in at about 11 minutes 15 seconds. The new boys are being dropped off for their first day at their ‘elite’ English boarding school. In the scene, viewers can infer that the child is saying goodbye to his parents. It seems that there exists an absence of love and human warmth, or an inability to express it, as the parents make a hasty departure, the camera capturing the isolated child waving as his parent’s car recedes into the distance on wet and grey English day. Would George Orwell, at the age of 8 in 1911, have felt similar abandonment on his first day at his own boarding school, St Cyprian’s? The early scenes in his long essay, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ (1952) suggest that he felt the abandonment acutely. Indeed, the impact of St Cyprian’s on Orwell was lifelong. In 1938, he wrote to his friend, the writer Cyril Connolly, a contemporary at St Cyprian’s and Eton: “I’m always meaning to write a book about St Cyprian’s. I’ve always held that the public schools aren’t so bad, but people are wrecked by those filthy private schools long before they get to public school age”. Did Orwell consider himself among the ‘wrecked’?

This week, we are adding materials to support students in their study of Orwell’s essay, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, part of a series of pages on Orwell’s essays. The page can be found here. Since you are at school and your students are at school – some perhaps attending boarding school – we think this essay is of considerable intrinsic interest, and we hope you enjoy working with the materials.

David and Tim