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Born July 26, 1856, Dublin, Ireland, George Bernard Shaw 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 sinecured civil servant and then an unsuccessful grain merchant, and George Bernard grew up in an atmosphere of genteel poverty
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At first Shaw was tutored by a clerical uncle, and he basically rejected the schools he then attended; by age 16 he was working in a land agent’s office.
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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.
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In 1876 Shaw resolved to become a writer, and he joined his mother and elder sister (the younger one having died) in London. Shaw in his 20s suffered continuous frustration and poverty. He depended upon his mother’s pound a week from her husband and her earnings as a music teacher.
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He spent his afternoons in the British Museum reading room, writing novels and reading what he had missed at school, and his evenings in search of additional self-education in the lectures and debates that characterized contemporary middle-class London intellectual activities. -
The titled Immaturity (1879; published 1930) repelled every publisher in London. His next four novels were similarly refused, as were most of the articles he submitted to the press for a decade. Shaw’s initial literary work earned him less than 10 shillings a year. A fragment posthumously published as An Unfinished Novel in 1958 (but written 1887–88) was his final false start in fiction.
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Shaw involved himself in every aspect of its activities, most visibly as editor of one of the classics of British socialism, Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), to which he also contributed two sections.
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Despite his failure as a novelist in the 1880s, Shaw found himself during this decade. He became a vegetarian, a socialist, a spellbinding tentatively a playwright. He became the force behind the newly founded (1884) Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English society
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Widowers’ Houses, as a play recognizably “Ibsenite” in tone, making it turn on the notorious scandal of slum landlordism in London. The result (performed 1892) flouted the threadbare romantic conventions that were still being exploited even by the most daring new playwrights. -
Eventually, in 1885, the drama critic William Archer found Shaw steady journalistic work. His early journalism ranged from book reviews in the World 1886–89 to brilliant musical columns in the Star (as “Corno di Bassetto”—basset horn) from 1888 to 1890 and in the World as “G.B.S.” from 1890 to 1894.
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Shaw truly began to make his mark when he was recruited by Frank Harris to the Saturday Review as theatre critic (1895–98); in that position he used all his wit and polemical powers in a campaign to displace the artificialities and hypocrisies of the Victorian stage with a theatre of vital ideas. He also began writing his own plays.
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When Shaw began writing for the English stage, its most prominent dramatists were Sir A.W. Pinero and H.A. Jones. Both men were trying to develop a modern realistic drama, but neither had the power to break away from the type of artificial plots and conventional character types expected by theatregoers.
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During the process of recuperation, he married his unofficial nurse, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Irish heiress and friend of Beatrice and Sidney Webb. The apparently celibate marriage lasted all their lives. -
Mrs. Warren’s Profession, written in 1893 but not performed until 1902 because the lord chamberlain, the censor of plays, refused it a license. Its subject is organized prostitution, and its action turns on the discovery by a well-educated young woman that her mother has graduated through the “profession” to become a part proprietor of brothels throughout Europe. -
Shaw called these first plays “unpleasant,” because “their dramatic power is used to force the spectator to face unpleasant facts.” He followed them with four “pleasant” plays in an effort to find the producers and audiences that his mordant comedies had offended. Both groups of plays were revised and published in Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898).
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George and his wife through out their marriage did not have children.
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Incredibly long, yet incredibly witty, "Man and Superman" demonstrates the best of Shaw. Brilliant yet flawed characters exchange equally complex and compelling ideas. -
World War I was a watershed for Shaw. At first he ceased writing plays, publishing instead a controversial pamphlet, “Common Sense About the War,” which called Great Britain and its allies equally culpable with the Germans and argued for negotiation and peace. -
For the next five years, he wrote nothing for the theatre but worked on his collected edition of 1930–38 and the encyclopaedic political tract “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism” (1928).
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"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."
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When his wife, Charlotte, died of a lingering illness in 1943, in the midst of World War II, Shaw, frail and feeling the effects of wartime privations, made permanent his retreat from his London apartment to his country home at Ayot St. Lawrence, a Hertfordshire village in which he had lived since 1906. He died there in 1950.
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After George Bernard Shaw had died they turned all the lights off in the theater to honor him and his work! -
- https://homework.study.com/explanation/where-is-george-bernard-shaw-buried.html#:~:text=George%20Bernard%20Shaw%20was%20not,their%20home%20in%20Hertfordshire%2C%20England.
- https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g154999-d13296914-Reviews-Statue_of_George_Bernard_Shaw-Niagara_on_the_Lake_Ontario.html#/media-atf/13296914/294824678:p/?albumid=-160&type=0&category=-160
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