George Bernard Shaw(1856–1950)

George Bernard Shaw was born at 3 Upper Synge Street in the Portobello district of south Dublin on 26 July 1856, the only son of George Carr Shaw, a Dublin Protestant of small Anglo-Irish gentry stock and unreliable habits, and Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly, a singing teacher. The household was, by Shaw's own description in the autobiographical fragments of *Sixteen Self Sketches* (1949), unstable: his father was an alcoholic whose wholesale corn business slowly failed through Shaw's childhood; his mother left Dublin in 1873 with her singing teacher Vandeleur Lee and went to London to set up a music-teaching business. Shaw stayed in Dublin three years longer, working as a junior clerk at a Townsend Street land agency, and followed his mother to London in 1876 at the age of twenty. He never lived in Ireland again. He never lost the Dublin accent. He spent the next nine years on the allowance his mother could spare and on his own meagre earnings from music journalism, ghostwriting columns for Vandeleur Lee in the Hornet music magazine and reading at the British Museum reading room as the office of his self-education.

He found socialism at twenty-four. He read Henry George's *Progress and Poverty* in 1882 and the first volume of Marx's *Capital* in the French translation in 1883, joined the Hyndman-led Social Democratic Federation briefly, then in September 1884 joined the four-month-old Fabian Society. The Fabian decade was the institutional shape of his political life: he wrote *Fabian Essays in Socialism* with Sidney Webb, Sydney Olivier and Annie Besant in 1889, ran the Fabian propaganda committee with Webb through the 1890s, and was a founding member of the syndicate that bought *The New Statesman* magazine in 1913 to be the Fabian weekly platform. Through the same period 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. The criticism, the politics and the music journalism funded the long apprenticeship in the writing of plays.

He was forty before the playwriting paid. The early plays (*Widowers' Houses* 1892, *Mrs Warren's Profession* 1893, *Arms and the Man* 1894, *Candida* 1894) were performed in small private subscription seasons at the Independent Theatre and the Royal Court but were not commercial successes; *Mrs Warren's Profession* (a play about a prostitute who has retired into running a chain of brothels) was banned from public performance in Britain until 1925 on the Lord Chamberlain's refusal of a licence. The break came at the Royal Court Theatre under Harley Granville-Barker's management between 1904 and 1907. Barker staged the first commercial run of the major Shaw plays as a season-by-season repertory: *John Bull's Other Island* (1904), *Major Barbara* (1905), *Caesar and Cleopatra* (1906), *The Doctor's Dilemma* (1906), *Man and Superman* (1907). By the end of the Barker run Shaw was, at fifty-one, the most-performed English playwright since Sheridan. The 1912 *Pygmalion* with Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle at the Royal Theatre Haymarket was the commercial blockbuster; the 1923 *Saint Joan* at the New Theatre with Sybil Thorndike was the play that took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.

He refused the Nobel cash prize on the grounds that he did not need it. The Swedish Academy's translator, the historian Klas Pontus Arnoldson, persuaded him after fifteen months of correspondence to accept the medal and the diploma; the money was redirected, on Shaw's instruction, to the foundation of the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation. He turned down a knighthood three times. He accepted the Order of Merit in 1925 (membership in the OM was less than membership in a chivalric order and required no kneeling). He had been a founder, with Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Graham Wallas, of the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1895; the school's first courses ran from rented rooms at 9 John Street, Adelphi in the autumn of 1895 and the Fabian-Webb-Shaw nucleus of the founders remained the moral-intellectual centre of the school through the next thirty years. The 1930s political register went off the rails. He travelled to the Soviet Union in 1931 (was photographed in audience with Stalin), came home saying things about the Soviet experiment that the 1937 show trials and the post-1945 disclosures could not be reconciled with. The Mussolini sympathies of the early 1930s were less direct but were on the record. Both are part of the standard modern biographical paragraph.

He married the Anglo-Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend in June 1898 at a ceremony at the Strand Register Office. The marriage was, by Shaw's own description, celibate from start to finish; Charlotte had a moral objection to consummation that he honoured. They lived at Adelphi Terrace, London, and from 1906 at Shaw's Corner, the Edwardian house at Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire that he had taken on a long lease and that became the home of the rest of his life. Charlotte died in September 1943. He continued writing at Ayot St Lawrence; he gave his copyrights to the National Trust on the condition that the house become a museum after his death. He fell from a ladder pruning a plum tree at the house in September 1950, at the age of ninety-four, broke his femur, did not recover, and died there on 2 November 1950. The ashes were mixed with Charlotte's and scattered in the Ayot St Lawrence garden. The Shaw name in its English-side catalogue is the locative *shaw* (a wood); he carried it from a Dublin clerk's house into the Nobel Prize and the foundation of the London School of Economics, and into ninety-four years of arguing in public with his contemporaries.