Such, Such Were the Joys

"Such, Such Were the Joys" is a long autobiographical essay by the English writer George Orwell.

In the piece, Orwell describes his experiences between the ages of eight and thirteen, in the years before and during World War I (from September 1911 to December 1916), while a pupil at a preparatory school: St Cyprian's, in the seaside town of Eastbourne, in Sussex. The essay offers various reflections on the contradictions of the Edwardian middle and upper class world-view, on the psychology of children, and on the experience of oppression and class conflict.

It was probably drafted in 1939–40, revised in 1945–46, and not completed until May or June 1948. It was first published by the Partisan Review in 1952, two years after Orwell's death.

The veracity of the stories it contains about life at St. Cyprian's has been challenged by a number of commenters, including Orwell's contemporaries at the school and biographers, but its powerful writing and haunting observations have made it one of Orwell's most commonly anthologised essays.

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:

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 most of the adults connected with the school, — particularly the headmaster, Mr. Vaughan Wilkes, nicknamed "Sambo," and his wife Cicely, nicknamed "Flip".

...
Wikipedia