Orwell Read Free

Ringwood Academy where Dorothy teaches in A
Clergyman's Daughter.
And its psychological atmosphere is reproduced and intensified in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, where the guilt is familial as well as political. Winston feels regret about stealing his sister's food and feels responsible for the tragic disappearance of his family in the purges, and this guilt is expressed in his recurrent nightmare about his drowning mother and sister. The overwhelming doom that threatens Orwell at school also threatens Bowling in
Coming Up for Air
; and the fearful oppression by one's fellows recurs in
Animal Farm.
The lonely Orwell's desperate need for human sympathy, comradeship and solidarity is at the emotional core of
Homage to Catalonia
; and a deep sympathy for the oppressed underdog sent Orwell to Spain and put him on the road to Wigan Pier. At school Orwell learned “the good and the possible never seemed to coincide,” and in an important sense, his whole life was an attempt to bring them together. Oppression and humiliation formed the dominant pattern of his personal life at the time when Europe was being dominated by Communism and Fascism.
    In his essay on Dalí, Orwell states: “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” Orwell's feelings in “Such, Such” were so intense, his revelations so personal, that he never published the essay during his lifetime. Cyril Connolly's
Enemies of Promise
gives a rather different and more promising picture of their prep school, and when his book was published Orwell wrote to him, “I wonder how you can write abt St Cyprian's. It's all like an awful nightmare to me.”
    The horrors that Orwell suffered represent an archetypal childhood trauma and are similar to those in Dickens and Joyce, which illuminate his condition. Orwell compares St. Cyprian's to Dotheboys Hall in
Nicholas Nickleby
, andthat infamous school, where “lasting agonies and disfigurements are inflicted upon children by the treatment of the master,” 14 probably influenced Orwell's portrayal of his school as a reactionary and barbaric Victorian institution. Mrs Squeers feeds the boys brimstone and treacle “because it spoils their appetites and comes cheaper than breakfast and dinner,” 15 and Orwell writes that “Only a generation earlier it had been common for school dinners to start off with a slab of unsweetened suet pudding, which, it was frankly said, ‘broke the boys’ appetites.’” Mrs Squeers taps the crown of the boys’ heads with a wooden spoon just as Sambo “taps away at one's skull with his silver pencil.” And the scene where Squeers flogs the helpless boy, who has warts on his hands and who has failed to pay his full fees, is psychologically similar to Orwell's caning for bed-wetting, since both boys must confess to an imaginary “dirty” crime while suffering unjust punishment.
    â€œSuch, Such” and the school chapters of A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
both discuss the themes of authority, guilt, cruelty, punishment, helplessness, isolation and misery. Both Stephen and Orwell are bullied by the older stronger boys: Stephen is pushed into the cold slimy water by Wells, and Orwell fears “the daily nightmare of football—the cold, the mud … the gouging knees and trampling boots of the bigger boys…. That was the pattern of school life—a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak.” The innocent Stephen is abused and beaten by Father Dolan: “Lazy idle little loafer! cried the prefect of studies. Broke my glasses! An old schoolboy trick! Out with your hand this moment!” 16 just as Orwell is by Sambo: “Go on, you little slacker! Go on, you idle, worthless little boy! The whole trouble with you is that you're