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"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,〔It Is What I Think, p.355; Crick 587-588〕 revised in 1945–46, and not completed until May or June 1948.〔Collected Works, VOL XIX, ''It Is What I Think'', p.355〕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 essay first appeared in book form in the collection ''Such, Such Were the Joys'', published in the US by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1953. It was later included in ''The Orwell Reader: A Treasury of the Best of George Orwell'' (1956), in the ''Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage'' (1961), in ''The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell'' (1968), in ''A Collection of Essays'' (1970), in ''Autobiography: A Reader for Writers'' (1984), in ''Essays,'' by Everyman's Library Classics (2002), in ''Facing Unpleasant Facts'' (2009), and elsewhere.〕 == 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:〔Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, ''The Unknown Orwell'', Constable 1972 ISBN 0-586-08178-X〕 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". Orwell describes the education he received as "a preparation for a sort of confidence trick," geared entirely towards maximising 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. He describes the approach as amounting to being cynically 'crammed', as a 'goose is crammed for Christmas'. The process is exemplified by the 'date learning' teaching of history in which boys were encouraged to learn dates, without any understanding of 'the mysterious events they were naming.' "1587? ''Massacre of St. Bartholomew''! 1713? ''Treaty of Utrecht'' – 1520? ''Field of the Cloth of Gold''! and so on." 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 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'' (him ) 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." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Such, Such Were the Joys」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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