Word: etonisms
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From a letter to an Eton friend about the funeral of King George...
...which the students wanting to get a job or into medical school needn't worry about directly. For the first time since 1636, Harvard doesn't produce the end product of the educational mill. Most of its students get their final polish somewhere else. George Orwell went to Eton but did not then attend a British university, a procedure which today seems odd. In a few years, it may seem as odd to go to Harvard College and then not attend a graduate school of some sort...
Brooks, however, has chosen to retain as much of the Ashburn tradition as possible. As his successor, the school picked 35-year-old Peter Aitkens, a former physics teacher at England's Eton College, precisely because he was committed to Ashburn's concept of a small, select boarding school...
Blair went to Eton, had an undistinguished but adequate record, and, needing a career, went to Burma, at the time a part of the British Indian Empire. For five years he was an Assistant Superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He came back to Europe and for another five years tried to become a writer. He became a writer, and became George Orwell when Down and Out in Paris and London appeared in 1933. In making that transformation he escapes from this book, which restricts itself to the unknown Eric Blair...
Peter Stansky and William Abrahams follow Blair's life in considerable detail. Their attempts to convey the atmosphere of St. Cyprian's preparatory school, Eton, and Burma show they researched and wrote their account carefully. But that does very little to remedy their focus on the peripheral facets of Blair-Orwell's life...