Programme, St. Cyprian's, December 1916

Original program for a wartime musical theater performance by the boys of St. Cyprian's School, featuring three major British authors-to-be: George Orwell, Cecil Beaton, and Cyril Connolly. Orwell (then known as Eric Blair) and Connolly played characters in "Mr. Jingle's Wooing," an adaptation of Dickens's The Pickwick Papers. A young Cecil Beaton played Little Buttercup in "Pinafore Potted," based on Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore. Perhaps Orwell's performance colored his perception of the school, as it would be immortalized, uncharacteristically, with Dickensian gloominess as "Crossgates" in his essay "Such, Such Were the Joys." The essay was unprintable in the UK due to their slander laws, so it was first published in the US instead in 1952. Orwell's biographer Jeffrey Meyers notes that once WWI began, the boys of St. Cyprian's prep school "practiced drill on the playing field, followed the latest battles on maps in the classrooms and visited the wounded Tommies in army hospitals, where they handed out peppermint creams and Woodbine cigarettes." This particular dramatic performance was staged not only for family and friends of the school, but also for almost a hundred wounded soldiers back from the front. The decorated wrappers, featuring a jaunty young man wrapped in bandages, smoking a cigarette, pay tribute to the boys' special guests. Orwell's classmate Walter John Christie, whose hand-painted illustration graces the front wrap, would recall St. Cyprian's much more rosily in a 1970 piece for Blackwood's Magazine, "St. Cyprian's Days." He and Orwell came from similar lower-middle class families with civil-servant fathers in India, but he wrote that he felt Orwell "had a chip on his shoulder through out most of his life." Helpfully, he also cited the contemporary school paper's review of the night's performance: "Eric Blair in the person of Mr Wardle was exceedingly good in a somewhat difficult part." Connolly and Beaton also received positive write-ups. Printed bifolium, measuring 7" x 4.5" folded, double-punched at folded edge and tied with ribbon into grey wrappers measuring 9.25" x 6". Front wrapper illustrated with an original hand-colored drawing by W.J. Christie of a bandaged soldier smiling and smoking a cigarette. Light wear and soiling to outer wrappers with small chip to upper right corner, ribbon ties threadbare. A remarkable survival of a serendipitous night of children's theater, skillfully decorated by a St. Cyprian's alumnus. Scarce.…