By Daniel J. Leab:

A second posthumous collection of Orwell's essays, including some of his best. Almost a third of the book is given over to a vitriolic memoir of his childhood school days at St. Cyprian's (1911-1916), called “Crossgate's” in this piece (first published in Partisan Review in 1952). The title is taken from one of William Blake's Songs of lnnocence:

Such, such were the joys
When we all, girls and boys,
In our youth time were seen,
On the echoing green.

There has been among scholars some debate as to when the article was written, as it is felt that this might reflect on his mood at the time Nineteen Eighty-Four was reworked in manuscript. It would seem that Orwell may have distorted his experiences at school. Whatever his experiences at St. Cyprian's, Orwell dramatically took apart childhood life at private schools, institutions he fervently wished to have closed down.

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Visit ‘The Daniel J. Leab Collection Of Books And Manuscripts By And About George Orwell’:
URI: http://www.brown.edu/ ... /leab.html

Contents:

Such, Such Were the Joys, 1953

• Why I Write, 1946

• Such, Such Were the Joys, 1947

• Writers and Leviathan, 1948

• Anti-Semitism in Britain, 1945

• Poetry and the Microphone, 1945

• Marrakech, 1939

• Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1943

• Inside the Whale, 1940

• England Your England, 1941