Biography Of George Bernard Shaw

Table of Contents

EARLY LIFE

Shaw was born on 26 July 1856 in Portobello a lower-middle-class part of Dublin. He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw (1814–1885) and Lucinda Elizabeth (Bessie) Shaw 1830–1913).
His elder siblings were Lucinda (Lucy) Frances (1853–1920) and Elinor Agnes (1855–1876).By the time of Shaw’s birth, his mother had become close to George John Lee, a flamboyant figure well known in Dublin’s musical circles.
Shaw retained a lifelong obsession that Lee might have been his biological father.

The Shaws’ house was often filled with music, with frequent gatherings of singers and players. Between 1865 and 1871, Shaw attended four schools, all of which he hated.
In October 1871 he left school to become a junior clerk in a Dublin firm of land agents, where he worked hard, and quickly rose to become head cashier.
During this period, Shaw was known as “George Shaw”; after 1876, he dropped the “George” and styled himself “Bernard Shaw”.In June 1873, Lee left Dublin for London and never returned.

Shaw maintained contact with Lee, who found him work as a rehearsal pianist and occasional singer.Eventually Shaw was driven to applying for office jobs.
In the interim he secured a reader’s pass for the British Museum Reading Room and spent most weekdays there, reading and writing.
His first attempt at drama, begun in 1878, was a blank-verse satirical piece on a religious theme. It was abandoned unfinished, as was his first try at a novel. His first completed novel, Immaturity (1879), was too grim to appeal to publishers and did not appear until the 1930s.

He was employed briefly by the newly formed Edison Telephone Company in 1879–80.Thereafter he pursued a full-time career as an author.
For the next four years Shaw made a negligible income from writing, and was subsidised by his mother. He grew a beard to hide a facial scar left by smallpox.
On 5 September 1882 Shaw attended a meeting at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon, addressed by the political economist Henry George. Shaw then read George’s book Progress and Poverty, which awakened his interest in economics

He began attending meetings of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), where he discovered the writings of Karl Marx.
After reading a tract, Why Are The Many Poor?, issued by the recently formed Fabian Society, Shaw went to the society’s next advertised meeting, on 16 May 1884. He became a member in September.
From 1885 to 1889 Shaw attended the fortnightly meetings of the British Economic Association.

Shaw’s first plays were published in volumes titled “Plays Unpleasant” (containing Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer and Mrs. Warren’s Profession) and “Plays Pleasant” (which had Arms and the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny and You Never Can Tell).
The plays were filled with what would become Shaw’s signature wit, accompanied by healthy doses of social criticism, which stemmed from his Fabian Society leanings.
These plays would not go on to be his best remembered, or those for which he had high regard, but they laid the groundwork for the oversized career to come.

Shaw landed some writing work in the form of book reviews and art, music and theater criticism, and in 1895 he was brought aboard the Saturday Review as its theater critic. It was at this point that Shaw began writing plays of his own.
At first he made slow progress; The Philanderer, written in 1893 but not published until 1898, had to wait until 1905 for a stage production.
Shaw’s first play to bring him financial success was Arms and the Man (1894). The success of Arms and the Man was not immediately replicated.

Candida, which presented a young woman making a conventional romantic choice for unconventional reasons, received a single performance in South Shields in 1895.
By the later 1890s Shaw’s political activities lessened as he concentrated on making his name as a dramatis. In 1898, as a result of overwork, Shaw’s health broke down. He was nursed by Charlotte Payne-Townshend with whom he marriedon 1 June 1898.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, Shaw secured a firm reputation as a playwright. Over the next five years they staged fourteen of Shaw’s plays.
Man and Superman, completed in 1902. and Among the other Shaw works presented by Vedrenne and Granville-Barker were Major Barbara (1905), and the Salvation Army.
The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906), a mostly serious piece about professional ethics and Caesar and Cleopatra. Fanny’s First Play, a comedy about suffragettes, had the longest initial run of any Shaw play—622 performances.

It was followed by one of Shaw’s most successful plays, Pygmalion, written in 1912 and staged in Vienna the following year, and in Berlin shortly afterwards.
Thus, although a nominated Fabian delegate, he did not attend the London conference at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street in February 1900, that created the Labour Representation Committee—precursor of the modern Labour Party.
In 1904 he stood in the London County Council elections. It was Shaw’s final foray into electoral politics.Nationally, the 1906 general electionproduced a huge Liberal majority and an intake of 29 Labour members.

Shaw remained a member, but left the executive in April 1911. After the First World War began in August 1914, Shaw produced his tract Common Sense About the War, which argued that the warring nations were equally culpable.
Three short plays by Shaw were premiered during the war. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 led to the partition of Ireland between north and south, a provision that dismayed Shaw.
Shaw remained a British subject all his life, but took dual British-Irish nationality in 1934.

Shaw’s first major work to appear after the war was Heartbreak House, written in 1916–17 and performed in 1920.
Shaw’s largest-scale theatrical work was Back to Methuselah, written in 1918–20 and staged in 1922. He was now sixty-seven, and expected to write no more plays.
He wrote Saint Joan in the middle months of 1923, and the play was premiered on Broadway in December. It was enthusiastically received there, and at its London premiere the following March.After Saint Joan, it was five years before Shaw wrote a play.

From 1924, he spent four years writing what he described as his “magnum opus”, a political treatise entitled The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.
During the 1920s Shaw began to lose faith in the idea that society could be changed through Fabian gradualism, and became increasingly fascinated with dictatorial methods.
Shaw’s enthusiasm for the Soviet Union dated to the early 1920s when he had hailed Lenin as “the one really interesting statesman in Europe”.

With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Shaw’s final plays of the 1930s were Cymbeline Refinished (1936), Geneva (1936) and In Good King Charles’s Golden Days(1939).
Shaw continued to write into his nineties. His last plays were Buoyant Billions (1947), his final full-length work; Farfetched Fables (1948).

He died at the age of ninety-four of renal failure precipitated by injuries incurred when falling while pruning a tree.He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 6 November 1950.
He wrote the total of sixty-two plays.