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Orwell looked back harshly on the "shabby genteel" class inhabited by his parents and their friends: "Practically the whole family income goes in keeping up appearances." Unlike most who rebel from the worlds of their childhood, Eric became hypercritical of himself as well; his behavior during his early years, his adult memories of this period, both convey the peculiar sense that he considered himself not good enough for a style of life he disliked. The Blairs kept up appearances by enrolling their son, at reduced tuition, in St. Cyprian's, an institution that rigorously prepared boys for the great public schools. Eric, 8, was caned for bed wetting: the place encouraged him to feel unworthy. "I had no money, I was weak, I was ugly, I was unpopular, I had a chronic cough, I was cowardly, I smelt, I was an unattractive boy."
Jacintha Buddicom, now 82, who met and became friends with Eric Blair during his school vacations, disputes this self-portrait: "The business about how unpopular he was was a lot of nonsense, a fairy story." He fished and hunted, kept pet guinea pigs and roamed the Oxfordshire countryside. But Jacintha did not see him at St. Cyprian's. Critic Cyril Connolly, who was his classmate, would later remember that Eric "felt bitterly that he was taken on at reduced fees because he might win the school a scholarship; he saw this as a humiliation, but it was really a compliment." The prickly youth did, in fact, earn a scholarship to Eton, winning praise for himself and his school. Yet his account of leaving St. Cyprian's hardly reflects a sense of triumph: "Failure, failure, failure—failure behind me, failure ahead of me—that was by far the deepest conviction that I carried away."
He may not have felt like this at the time; an older man wrote these words in an essay, in a world drastically altered. But Eric's conduct at Eton did not resemble the courtship of success. He idled his way through 4½ years at the apex of English secondary education, growing tall (6 ft. 3 in.) and awkward in the process. He read widely in his favorite authors (Dickens, Thackeray, Kipling, H.G. Wells), contributed some poems to school publications and took part grudgingly in athletics. His father could not afford to send him to Oxford or Cambridge without a scholarship, and Eric's academic performance ensured that no scholarship would be offered.
The lack of university training left him at a dead end in England. The professions, even the higher reaches of the civil service, were closed. It also made Eric an outsider to his friends and classmates, those Etonians who were going on to do great things in government and the arts. So he chose the course his father had taken and left the country; he joined the Imperial Indian Police and was dispatched to keep order among the colonial subjects in Burma.