The George Bernard Shaw Collection

George Bernard Shaw, (26th July, 1856, Dublin, Ireland—2nd November, 1950, Hertfordshire, England), was an Irish playwright, author, literary critic, political activist, socialist propagandist, and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. He was the third and youngest child (and only son) of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly Shaw. Technically, he belonged to the Protestant ascendancy, the landed Irish gentry, but his impractical father was first a sinecure civil servant and then an unsuccessful grain merchant. Therefore, he grew up in an atmosphere of genteel poverty, which to him was more humiliating than being merely poor. At first, he was tutored by his clerical uncle, then he was sent to various schools in Dublin but developed a great dislike for the formalized education systems. Shaw developed a wide knowledge of music, art, and literature as a result of his mother’s influence and his visits to the National Gallery of Ireland. After working in an estate agent’s office for a while, in 1876, he left for London to join his mother. In London, he established himself as a leading music and theatre critic in the eighties and nineties and became a prominent member of the Fabian Society, for which he composed many pamphlets. With fellow Fabians such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, he played an important role in the foundation of the London School of Economics (LSE) after receiving private bequests. Shaw began his literary career as a novelist and as a fervent advocate of the new theatre of Ibsen (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891) he decided to write plays in order to illustrate his criticism of the English stage. By the 1890s, his plays were being performed in London and the income from his plays enabled him to devote his life to writing. Like his contemporary, Oscar Wilde, his plays were popular for their biting wit and humour. His plays were in contrast to many Victorian plays which tended to be sentimental, escapist, and lacking in satire.