Astral Codex Ten

Eton

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Eton

Article

Eton is a recurring venue in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 10, 2021 and December 09, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “The bloke went to Eton, after all”; “he was a upper middle class Etonian”; “nor even admissions at Eton”. It most often appears alongside Fussell, Japan, Paris.

Metadata

  • Category: Venues
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: June 10, 2021
  • Last seen: December 09, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: Down And Out In Paris And London
June 10, 2021 · Original source
Orwell begins in Paris, where a long period of intermittent employment followed by a robbery have reduced him from poor-to-middle-class-expat to actual poor person. This is Orwell’s first published book, and he’s quite young (23-25) at the time of writing. I mention this only because, suprisingly, Orwell utterly lacks romantic notions about living an impoverished, bohemian life in a world-class city. Instead he characterizes his plunge into the Parisian underworld as a means of purging himself of the predjudices he aquired as an upper middle class Etonian. His descriptions of the characters in the run down hotel where he starts out are about as close as he gets to Kerouacish gushing about the wacky beatitude that arises out of a life in poverty:
Yet I don’t quite believe that Orwell, a highly educated man, and, well, George Orwell, was quite as content as he makes himself out to be. If there is any privilege or classist blindspot that Orwell himself fails to acknowledge here, it is that throughout this book, there is a sense of inevitablity around Orwell’s eventual escape from this life. I can’t point at a specific passage where this makes itself apparent, but I find it permeates the entire text; Orwell knows that eventually he will get out of this, someway, somehow. The bloke went to Eton, after all. That will come up again later on, but suffice it to say, Orwell’s situation never feels really, truly desperate to me. But perhaps that’s just testament to his complete and utter lack of self-pity…and to the intense but fleeting pleasures of a working class life, characterized by back breaking work punctuated by long bouts of drinking:
From this and other research into Orwell’s life at this time, I think we can surmise that his life in Paris was in no way a performance, a LARP, or even an intentional bit of journalism, at least at first. Orwell simply had no other options. On the other hand, his life in London was, at least somewhat, chosen. Orwell’s first published work would end up being an essay on conditions in ‘Spikes’ or, what basically amounted to state run shelters for tramps. But he had family willing to take him in, and shameful though it would be for a twenty five year old Eton graduate to resort to that, there was no real need for him to live as he did in London. But he did live in that way, and I think his reasons are mostly immaterial in regards to his experiences and insights. When class comes into play, Orwell readily acknowledges it. Yet it turns out to be less a factor than he’d first expected. He rarely receives special treatment, but it only adds to his sense of personal degradation:
Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise
December 09, 2022 · Original source
Britain is a good example; not because it's the most illustrative, but just because it's the only country with whose popular culture the average American might be expected to be somewhat familiar. And it's a similar story, old moneyed elite getting kicked down by a new and supposedly-more-meritocratic elite. The process was perhaps a bit slower and a bit less complete (e.g. the new Prime Minister might be an Indian but he still went to Winchester). Among the many trends explaining this, I don't think admissions at Oxford/Cambridge are really close to the top, nor even admissions at Eton etc.