Not unusual to have serious themes in juxtaposition with a comedic plot. Warren's Profession (1898),ĭepicting organized commercial prostitution.

Shaw's writings were often controversial as in The Philanderer (1898), a play about the 'new woman,' and Mrs. He did not see a play of his produced on stage until 1892 with Widowers' Houses, a dramatized socialist tract on slumlordism. Though Shaw experimented with drama from his early Shaw remained a boarder in his mother's home until 1889, leaving only when, at theĤ2, he married Irish heiress and fellow Fabian Charlotte Payne-Townshend the marriage The artificialities and hypocrisies he found in those arts. Journalism career as a book reviewer and art, music, and drama critic, always downgrading Wrote socialist pamphlets, and spoke to crowds several times a week. A driving force behind the Fabian Society, he threw himself into committee Vegetarian, a socialist, a skillful orator, and developed his first beginnings as Shaw spent his days in the British Museum reading room writing novels and reading,Įvenings attending lectures and debates by the middle class intelligentsia. On his mother's income as a music teacher and a pound a week sent by his father from His first years in London, 1876-1884, were filled with frustration and poverty. Joined them the following year at the age of twenty hoping to make a living by writing. When her teacher moved to London Shaw's mother and two sisters followed. Singing lessons from a well known Dublin music teacher who eventually moved into the Outside of work, books, theater,Īnd art captured his attention, but it was music that pervaded his home. Giving him an early familiarity with economic injustice.

In a land agent's office which required him to go out among the poor to collect rent, Shaw's official education consisted of being tutored by an uncle and brieflyĪttending Protestant and Catholic day schools. Landed Irish gentry, Shaw's father was unable to sustain any more than a facade of Born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 26, 1856, George Bernard Shaw was the only son andĪnd youngest child of George Carr and Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly Shaw.

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