luka

Well-known member
im not saying it wasnt brutal. thats why i typed out the two pasdsages i typed out today. to indicate the brutality of it (and the quite advanced forms of psychological sadism and manipulation involved ) i just didnt want to say it was especailly brutal. i have no idea how it compared to the shcool system in other places.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Oh sorry I realise now you meant the english school system as per my comment.

Not slept much so brain isn't in top condition.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
"Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian's (not immediately, but after a week or two, just when I seemed to be settling into the routine of school life) I began wetting my bed. I was now aged eight, so that this was a reversion to a habit which I must have grown out of at least four years earlier. Nowadays, I believe, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted. It is normal reaction in children who have been removed from their homes to a strange place. In those days, however, it was looked on as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose and for which the proper cure was a beating. For my part I did not need to be told it was a crime. Night after night I prayed, with a fervour never previously attained in my prayers, ‘Please God, do not let me wet my bed! Oh, please God, do not let me wet my bed!’, but it made remarkably little difference. Some nights the thing happened, others not. There was no volition about it, no consciousness. You did not properly speaking do the deed: you merely woke up in the morning and found that the sheets were wringing wet."

 

version

Well-known member
Does this extend into the adult world? The English fixation on presenteeism, clocking in and grinding for eight hours, seems like an extension of the school. Although the school day's obviously designed to accustom you to the world of work, so it cuts both ways.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I watched that film A Dangerous Method the other night about Jung/Freud and Keira Knightley's character has learned to associate (or instinctively associated) being beaten by her father with sexual excitement.

This is getting offtopic, though, I don't feel this particular fetish manifests itself in what I've read of Dickens.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
That Orwell quote is very Dickensian - the fury in it about the unjust, illogical viciousness of adults towards children.
 

luka

Well-known member
Does this extend into the adult world? The English fixation on presenteeism, clocking in and grinding for eight hours, seems like an extension of the school. Although the school day's obviously designed to accustom you to the world of work, so it cuts both ways.

the whole discplinary machinery. i emphasise school because that is where the mind learns to fly away, if it does learn, and when the flights of fancy are both most vivid and most effective as compensation. gazing out the window being the quintessential attitude of the schoolchild.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Harry Potter is in this lineage, of course - a public school (effectively) where at least half the adults are tyrannical, insane monsters.
 

luka

Well-known member
Harry Potter is in this lineage, of course - a public school (effectively) where at least half the adults are tyrannical, insane monsters.

almost all of English childrens literature involves a boarding school. so many stories begin with the train ride home for the holidays.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I do think the industrial revolution might be key to this - in that England was one of the first countries to be ravaged by it. That materialist, capitalist mindset which Blake rebelled against. The 'mind forged manacles' of industrialism. Child labour etc.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
almost all of English childrens literature involves a boarding school. so many stories begin with the train ride home for the holidays.

I guess Harry Potter is an inversion of that formula, in that 'home' is where things are boring and horrific and the public school is where the fun is.
 

luka

Well-known member
I do think the industrial revolution might be key to this - in that England was one of the first countries to be ravaged by it. That materialist, capitalist mindset which Blake rebelled against. The 'mind forged manacles' of industrialism. Child labour etc.

i think so
 

version

Well-known member
Perhaps they've already lost a few. You get booksellers disappearing pretty regularly over there.
 

luka

Well-known member
a face which has been scrubbed in preperation for the day presumably or at least that is how i've alweays read it
 
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