George Bernard Shaw(1856–1950)

George Bernard Shaw was born at 3 Upper Synge Street in south Dublin on 26 July 1856 and followed his mother to London in 1876, at the age of twenty. He never lived in Ireland again and never lost the Dublin accent. For nine years he supported himself by music and theatre journalism while reading at the British Museum reading room, which he treated as the office of his own education.

He found socialism at twenty-four, reading Henry George and Marx, and in September 1884 joined the four-month-old Fabian Society, the institution that gave his political life its shape. He co-wrote Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889) with Sidney Webb, Sydney Olivier and Annie Besant, ran the Fabian propaganda committee through the 1890s, and was a founding member of the syndicate that bought The New Statesman in 1913 as the Fabian weekly. In the same years he was the music critic of The Star, under the byline Corno di Bassetto, from 1888, and the drama critic of The Saturday Review from 1895.

He was forty before the playwriting paid, and then it paid handsomely. The breakthrough came at the Royal Court Theatre under Harley Granville-Barker between 1904 and 1907, where John Bull's Other Island, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, The Doctor's Dilemma and Man and Superman were staged as a season-by-season repertory. By the end of that run Shaw was, at fifty-one, the most-performed English playwright since Sheridan. Pygmalion, with Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle, was the 1912 commercial triumph; Saint Joan, in 1923, was the play that carried him to the Nobel.

He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 on the strength of Saint Joan, and directed the prize money to the foundation of the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation. He accepted the Order of Merit the same year and turned down a knighthood three times. With Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Graham Wallas he had already, in 1895, founded the London School of Economics and Political Science, whose first courses ran from rented rooms off the Adelphi that autumn; the founding nucleus remained the school's intellectual centre for the next thirty years.

Shaw kept writing at Shaw's Corner, his house at Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire, into his nineties, and gave it and his copyrights to the National Trust on the condition that the house become a museum. He died there in 1950 at the age of ninety-four. The Shaw name carries a Dublin clerk's son from a junior land-agency desk into the Nobel Prize, the founding of the London School of Economics, and a body of sixty plays still in the active repertory of the English-speaking theatre.