Eton College Satire

Eton College Satire: The School That Rules Britain

Eton College has educated nineteen British Prime Ministers, which is either evidence of the school’s extraordinary educational quality or evidence of something else entirely, depending on your view of British meritocracy. It is certainly evidence that the school provides exceptional satirical material, and British satirists have been making use of it with considerable enthusiasm since at least the nineteenth century.

What Eton Actually Is

Eton College is a boarding school in Windsor, Berkshire, founded in 1440 by Henry VI, which charges annual fees of approximately fifty thousand pounds per year and produces, with some regularity, people who end up running things. Its alumni include Boris Johnson, David Cameron, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Percy Shelley, Hugh Laurie, Dominic West, and Eddie Redmayne, a range that suggests the school’s output is more varied than its reputation implies, though the Prime Ministers tend to get more coverage than the novelists. Eton College’s website is written in a tone of careful institutional confidence.

The Old Etonian Network: Comedy Goldmine

The satirical richness of Eton derives not primarily from the school itself but from the network it produces: the concentration of alumni in British public life is sufficiently dense that it becomes, itself, a subject. When David Cameron and Boris Johnson were simultaneously prominent in British politics – having been at Eton and Oxford’s Bullingdon Club together – the satirical situation was almost too obvious to work with. The challenge for the satirist is not to identify the absurdity but to find an angle on it that hasn’t been used before, which becomes more difficult the more thoroughly the absurdity has been documented. The Guardian’s Eton coverage has been comprehensive and consistent.

The Bullingdon Club: Satire’s Gift

The Bullingdon Club, the Oxford dining club whose membership has included an unusual proportion of subsequent Conservative politicians, provides British satirists with an image – the group photograph of young men in blue tailcoats – that functions as a visual shorthand for a specific kind of British privilege. The photograph of David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and George Osborne as Bullingdon members was reproduced so frequently during their political careers that it became a standard component of any serious satirical treatment of the Conservative Party’s relationship to class. The subjects attempted, with varying success, to contextualise it.

George Orwell’s Dissent

Eton’s most famous satirist was educated there. George Orwell attended Eton on a scholarship in the 1910s, found the experience instructive in ways that the school perhaps did not intend, and went on to write two of the most important satirical works in the English language. His essay Such, Such Were the Joys, about his earlier preparatory school rather than Eton itself, is the most devastating satirical portrait of British educational culture ever written. The paradox – that an Eton education contributed to the formation of the man who wrote Animal Farm – is one that Eton has handled with characteristic institutional equanimity. The British Library’s Orwell collection is extensive.

The Defence and Its Satirical Possibilities

Eton’s defenders argue, not unreasonably, that the school’s alumni network reflects historical advantage rather than current exclusivity, that many of its current pupils are there on bursaries, and that judging an institution by its most prominent products is unfair to the majority who did not become Prime Ministers. These defences are themselves satirically interesting: they are accurate, reasonable, and completely ineffective at preventing people from noticing that an implausible proportion of British public life has been to the same school in Windsor. The accurate, reasonable response that changes nothing is, as British satirists well know, one of the funnier situations available.