George Orwell’s son has criticised the decision to drop his father’s Down and Out in Paris and London from an A-level English course and introduce a feminist account of his mother’s life.
Orwell’s 1933 memoir has been removed from the English language and literature syllabus by Cambridge OCR, and Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, a controversial biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, his first wife, has been added from next year. The book is a complex examination of O’Shaughnessy’s life. Its depiction of Orwell as a “sadistic and misogynistic” man, whose infidelity and behaviour ruined her life, has sparked heated debate among Orwell scholars.
That is from the Observer, who think it beneath them to link to the syllabus in question. If you look at the actual OCR English Language and Literature syllabus, the problem is worse than it looks. The syllabus already included books by Alexander Masters and Bill Bryson. It will now include writers like Tara Westover and Ana Kinsella. Other components allow the teaching of Ian McEwan instead of Jane Eyre and Carol Ann Duffy instead of Emily Dickinson. Yes, you read that correctly. Carol Ann Duffy instead of Emily Dickinson.
The problem is not that Wifedom is “replacing” Orwell, but that the whole syllabus is stupid either way.
I objected to Wifedom when it was published. It is simply inaccurate. It is the sort of book that sounds credible until you start looking up the footnotes, which often simply aren’t there. When they do exist, they aren’t reliable. From my review.
Funder writes that “clearly” Eileen had told the vicar to remove the word “obey” from the wedding vows. Orwell said that other parts of the service were missed out too. I was intrigued—did Eileen ask for these other things to be removed? What were they? I looked for the source. No footnote. Eileen’s previous biographer, Sylvia Topp, makes this same claim, referencing Orwell biographer Gordon Bowker. But Bowker has assumed this is what Eileen did. “Eileen, it seems, had arranged with John Woods to omit at least one of the vows...” He also has no source.
So perhaps Eileen arranged it, perhaps the vicar fumbled, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But this trail of speculation has been written up as near-fact. Apparently many suffragettes removed “obey”—if that’s the cause of this speculation, then tell me! Add it as useful context! But don’t just interpose your assumptions like this.
I hope this is going to be the object of study. Wifedom is there to teach “how the writers create the voice of their subject(s)” after all. But it is nonetheless an unworthy book. Can we doubt it was chosen for ideological reasons? We all know that choosing Carol Ann Duffy is cheating the child of their chance to study Emily Dickinson. This is like not teaching long division or natural selection; nor is it like teaching the order of Battle at Trafalgar.1
We also know that they don’t need to be taught Carol Ann Duffy. In a discussion of what an English syllabus should be, C.S. Lewis explained why it wouldn’t incorporate modern work. (The whole book is good value.)
The first thing to do, obviously, is to cut off some years from this end. The reasons for choosing this end are, I suppose, obvious. In the first place, we naturally wish to help the students in studying those parts of the subject where we have most help to give and they need help most. On recent and contemporary literature their need is least and our help least. They ought to understand it better than we, and if they do not then there is something radically wrong either with them or with the literature. But I need not labour the point. There is an intrinsic absurdity in making current literature a subject of academic study, and the student who wants a tutor’s assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse’s assistance in blowing his own nose. Again, things are understood by what precedes them rather than by what follows them.
I happened to read The World’s Wife when I was seventeen, on the advice of a wonderful teacher from the girls’ school over the road—she also recommended some Bach concertos—but it would have been unthinkable for that book to be on a syllabus, both to me and to the teacher who recommended it. (I was given William Golding for the modern text. We also read Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer—and, alas, Scott Fitzgerald.) There is a great difference between a book worth reading (for whatever reason) and a book worth putting on a syllabus. It is that distinction which the philistine supremacy always wants to erode.
Some pupils come from schools and families where Dickinson and Shakespeare will be available to them in other ways. Some do not. Some children are still reading as much as children ever did. Some are not. Some children will inherit the great tradition of English Literature whatever decisions are made by the people who set the syllabus. Some will not.
Some children will not suffer this opportunity cost very much. Some will pay the full price of it. It is the latter who suffer the most from these decisions.
“Some years ago, Lionel Trilling was writing in Partisan Review about the “unargued assumption” of our time that the one true object of the intellectual’s imaginative life was the modern world and its preoccupations. He expressed a certain nostalgia—even though rather diffidently—for “a quiet place” in which today’s intellectual “can be silent, in which he can know something—in what year the Parthenon was begun, the order of battle at Trafalgar, how Linear B was deciphered: almost anything that has nothing to do with the talkative and attitudinising present”. Things have changed a bit since then of course. I do not know whether the intellectual at the time was at all heedful of Trilling’s point, but I suspect that for his successor in the next generation—the present—the status of facts as facts has been still further diminished. Knowing something, in the sense Lionel Trilling had in mind, may seem to him more naive than ever.”
John Bayley, ‘The Order of Battle at Trafalgar.’
So: I followed the link to the syllabus, and it seems to me both a lot worse and slightly better than I understood from reading your summary.
Slightly better, in that I didn't understand that some of these are options, rather than a compulsory syllabus: it is still possible to study Emily Dickinson instead of Carol Ann Duffy (not your fault: reading back, you did say "allow the teaching of", and I simply misunderstood!).
But a lot worse, because I'm flabbergasted about just how limited and narrow the syllabus is as a whole. These are, if I understand correctly, people taking English as one of just three or four subjects at the school-leaving age of 18. And that's it? That's all they study? Fifteen short poems by one poet (only two of whom are writing before 1980)? One play, which doesn't have to be by Shakespeare? One (not very long) novel (only one of which was published before 1900)? And two factual books, both published (as they point out) after 2000? That's what they're spending a third of their time on for a year or two at school in their late teens? And this is meant to get them ready for studying English at university - or indeed for reading literature more widely at home?
Personally (and unlike C.S. Lewis), I think it's not a bad idea to include the occasional modern work in an English syllabus. I still remember the pleasure of studying Watership Down in school at the age of 12: it was less than 5 years after it was published. It's a book that I perhaps would have gotten round to reading eventually, but probably not so young, and I feel like I benefited hugely from reading it then - it's stayed with me for the rest of my life. But that was (a) a longer book than most of the ones on this syllabus; (b) challenging enough for a 12 year old so that it was helpful, if not essential, to read it with a teacher's guidance, and (c), crucially, being read in the context of a lot of more classic literature, which formed the main body of the syllabus.
I know teenagers are unwilling to read nowadays - in my own university-level teaching I push the students through a lot of difficult texts, and I'm met with constant complaints, as well as my own private realization that most of the students don't do all or even most of the reading, taking every short-cut they can to avoid it while still getting a reasonable grade. But I've never seen anything like this: these are students aged 17 or 18 who have actively chosen to study English, and they are made to read less in two years than I have on my syllabus for 6 weeks' worth of reading.
I don't know what can be done about this ("Old man shakes his fist at the heavens at the cluelessness of the young"). My feeling, like yours, is that there is still the desire for literature out there - novels are still being written and sold, even classic literature still seems to have a market. It's as much the lack of ambition on the part of the syllabus-setters that surprises me: presumably they COULD create a much more challenging syllabus if they wanted, and people would study it because they would have to. But apparently they don't. Is this about competition between subjects: the fear that if they make English too "difficult", people will abandon it for easier subjects instead?
This is a really brilliant article.