As someone who exaggerated the awfulness of her Catholic school education even while it was happening, I appreciate Orwell’s impulse to villainize St Cyprians.
It’s just a better story. And Orwell’s motives were more complex, and ultimately unknowable…
Orwell hated his time at prep school – or, at least, seemed to have decided that he hated it by the time he came to recall it in print. “Whoever writes about his childhood,” he says, “must beware of exaggeration and self-pity. I do not claim that I was a martyr, or that St Cyprian’s was a sort of Dotheboys Hall.” Disclaimer issued, he does exactly that, in a performance of grotesque literary effectiveness
