Century of a writer who shaped history

‘AN IRISHMAN'S heart is nothing but his imagination,’ observed George Bernard Shaw (GBS). In the history of literature, few writers have accumulated more honours than the extraordinary Dubliner. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, received an Academy Award for the screenplay of Pygmalion (1939), transformed modern drama, reshaped political debate in Britain and Ireland, and became one of the most quoted intellectuals of the 20th century. When he was not writing plays, he was co-founding the Independent Labour Party. When he was not helping to establish the London School of Economics, he found time to meet with Michael Collins, dine with Joseph Stalin and socialise with Oscar Wilde.

Such was Shaw’s cultural influence that the word ‘Shavian’ was coined to describe his works and ideas. What makes these achievements even more remarkable is that Shaw possessed only a limited formal education. He never attended university, was largely self-taught and spent much of his youth truanting from school and sitting in the libraries of Dublin, educating himself through relentless reading. In a society that worshipped credentials, Shaw built his reputation almost entirely through his own intellectual rigour and lived by his own maxim: “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” Yet there was nothing in his modest family background that suggested he would become one of the intellectual giants of the past century.

Early life

Shaw entered the world in circumstances far removed from the grandeur later associated with his name. Born in Dublin on July 26, 1856, less than ten years after An Gorta Mór, his Anglo-Irish Protestant family lived in genteel poverty. His father, George Carr Shaw, was a struggling grain merchant whose alcoholism meant that the little money brought into the household came largely from the music lessons given by Shaw’s emotionally distant mother, Lucinda. The Shaw home was marked by a lack of affection and a good deal of disappointment.

The young Bernard—as he preferred to be known—began to wander the streets of Dublin to avoid the cold house that was the Shaw family home. He found sanctuary not in schools, which he rarely attended and found intellectually oppressive, but in the city’s libraries, where he began to educate himself in literature, politics, philosophy, economics and music. Such was his appreciation of the education provided by Dublin’s public libraries that in his will he left 20 percent of his financial estate to the National Library of Ireland.

Socialism

In 1876, aged 20, Shaw followed his mother and sister to London. Shaw’s early years in the capital were marked by literary failure, with his first five novels rejected by publishers. The penniless Dubliner worked in offices and wrote musical reviews for his mother’s friends in his spare time. The young Shaw’s life seemed marked out for one of frustrated ambition. Yet London also exposed him to radical politics and intellectual circles unavailable in Dublin. He became deeply influenced by socialism, joining the Fabian Society in the 1880s. Unlike revolutionary Marxists, the Fabians advocated gradual social reform through democratic institutions. Shaw quickly emerged as one of the brightest and most controversial voices in the Fabian movement. Such was the influence of the Fabian tradition that 13 Nobel Prize winners and all seven Labour Prime Ministers would eventually write for journals associated with it.

It was through Fabian circles that Shaw became associated with the creation of institutions that reshaped modern Britain. The Fabian Society helped inspire the foundation of the Independent Labour Party and later the London School of Economics. Shaw regarded education as essential to social justice. He wanted working-class people equipped intellectually to challenge privilege. “Progress is impossible without change,” he insisted. “And those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” Behind the aphorisms stood genuine socialist conviction. Shaw despised exploitation, whether in the slums of Whitechapel or by absentee landlords in Ireland.

The playwright

By the 1890s, as he began to find his political calling, he simultaneously found his literary muse as a playwright. Shaw believed drama should challenge society rather than merely entertain it. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” he famously declared. “The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

To Victorian London, Shaw was an unreasonable Irishman whose plays outraged society with their unflinching exposure of social hypocrisy. His early works such as Widowers’ Houses (1892) and Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893) shocked audiences by confronting slum landlordism and prostitution. Ever the Irish contrarian, he refused to flatter respectable society. Instead, he exposed the economic structures beneath the moral posturing of upper-class English society.

A Wilde friendship

During the 1890s, Shaw began to emerge as one of the great figures of the theatre. His rival for the title of ‘King of the West End’ was another Dubliner, Oscar Wilde. Shaw’s relationship with Wilde was particularly fascinating because the two men represented rival forms of Irish brilliance. Wilde dazzled audiences with elegance, paradox and charm, while Shaw projected austerity, moral seriousness and argumentative intensity.

Though they were close acquaintances—if not good friends—they nevertheless recognised one another as intellectual equals. Shaw admired Wilde’s genius even while criticising what he viewed as Wilde’s devotion to style over social purpose. When Wilde fell from public grace after his prosecution in 1895, his fellow Dubliner was among the relatively few public intellectuals who defended his literary stature. He understood that Victorian society punished Wilde not merely for scandal, but for exposing its hypocrisies. Shaw’s own wit occasionally resembled Wilde’s. He once observed: “If you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh or they’ll kill you.” They laughed at Shaw but destroyed Wilde.

A real Superman

As the Victorian age gave way to the Edwardian era, Shaw emerged as the unrivalled master craftsman of British theatre. What followed was one masterpiece after another. In Man and Superman (1903), Shaw used biting satire and witty dialogue to mock the traditional gender roles of late Victorian society. The play was a roaring commercial success and toured Britain and Europe, yet one of its underlying messages was women’s equality. Through humour and social commentary, Shaw was quietly supporting the Suffragists and Suffragettes in their campaign for the vote.

In Major Barbara (1905), he investigated the conflict between morality and capitalism, particularly the relationship between religion and the arms industry. Again, Shaw employed humour to shine a light on the arms race between Britain and Germany before the Great War and to question the morality of militarism.

Pygmalion

Yet his most famous play was Pygmalion (1913), which tells the story of Professor Henry Higgins transforming a flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, into a refined lady through speech training. The play examines class divisions and social mobility in British society. It is no accident that the professor is given the Irish name Higgins—the outsider who looks in on the English class system and challenges its assumptions. There was more than a touch of autobiography in the most famous literary professor Shaw ever created. Higgins observed that the secret of success was ‘having the same manner with all souls.’

In theatre and in life, the Dubliner attempted to live by his socialist principles. In 1939, his screenplay of Pygmalion was nominated for an Oscar and Shaw was invited to the awards ceremony. He declined to attend, believing that public appreciation of his work mattered more than awards ceremonies. Pygmalion later became the musical My Fair Lady, which won eight Academy Awards in 1965. When Shaw won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, he famously refused the prize money, worth roughly one million pounds in today’s terms. The lifelong pacifist and anti-militarist commented: “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for his invention of the explosive, but only the devil could have invented the Nobel Prize.”

Meeting Michael Collins

The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 transformed Shaw into one of Britain’s most controversial public figures. Unlike many writers who embraced patriotic enthusiasm, Shaw condemned the irrational nationalism driving Europe towards catastrophe. His pamphlet Common Sense About the War criticised all sides of the conflict and infuriated British public opinion. When war fever swept through Britain in the summer of 1914, Shaw remained steadfast in his pacifism. He urged people ‘to pluck up courage and begin to talk and write soberly about the war.’ Many accused the Irishman of disloyalty to the Empire.

Yet Shaw’s hostility towards militarism stemmed partly from his Irish perspective. Having grown up in a colonised nation, he distrusted imperial rhetoric and emotional nationalism. He viewed war as the ultimate expression of political stupidity disguised as heroism. Moreover, as war raged in Europe, Ireland’s revolutionary decade (1912-1923) deeply affected him. Though Shaw did not support violent rebellion outright, he sympathised with Irish demands for self-government and recognised Britain’s historic failures in Ireland.

During the Irish War of Independence, Shaw followed events closely and developed respect for Michael Collins, not as a romantic martyr but as a practical statesman capable of compromise. Shaw viewed him differently from idealists who rejected negotiation; Collins understood political reality. Shaw saw in him the kind of pragmatic intelligence he valued throughout his life.

On August 18 1922, four days before Collins’s assassination in Cork, Shaw met ‘The Big Fellow’ in Dublin. The encounter left a lasting impression. He viewed Collins’s death as a tragedy not merely for Ireland but for political moderation itself. Shortly after Collins’ death, Shaw wrote a heartfelt letter of condolence to Collins’s sister: “How could a born soldier die better than at the victorious end of a good fight from the shot of another Irishman—a damn fool.” He also reflected: “I met Michael for the first and last time Saturday last and am very glad I did.” Shaw, who had met Mahatma Gandhi and was a close associate of Winston Churchill, understood that in Collins, Ireland had lost its greatest leader.

Supper with Stalin

One of the most controversial episodes in Shaw’s life was his 1931 visit to the Soviet Union, where he dined with Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin. Shaw emerged from the trip expressing admiration for aspects of Soviet society and appeared disturbingly willing to overlook the brutal realities of Stalinist repression. Shaw’s renowned critical faculties seemed to take a Russian holiday when he described Stalin as ‘a Georgian gentleman’ with no malice in him. Like many Western intellectuals during the interwar years, he saw capitalism struggling amid economic depression while fascism spread across Europe. The Soviet experiment appeared—at least briefly—to offer an alternative. History has judged Shaw harshly for this serious error of judgement and with good reason.

Complicated relationships

Shaw was so prolific in his writing and political activism that it is a wonder he found time for a personal life. Yet, in 1898, he married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a wealthy Irish heiress and fellow Fabian socialist. The marriage puzzled many observers. Charlotte was intelligent, politically engaged and independently wealthy. Bernard admired his older wife deeply. However, their relationship appeared unconventional, even by liberal intellectual standards of London’s fashionable Bloomsbury Set. There were no children, and rumours persisted for decades that the marriage was never physically consummated.

Although married, Shaw also maintained intense emotional relationships with several women throughout his life. The American actress Mrs Laurence Tompkins was the muse for several of his plays. It was widely believed that she was the inspiration for his most famous fictional character, Eliza Doolittle. Despite his questionable long-term romantic liaisons, Charlotte provided emotional stability and financial security. Their partnership endured until her death in 1943. As an older man, Shaw reflected on love and desire: “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.”

Legendary legacy

George Bernard Shaw lived until 1950, dying at the age of 94 after a fall while pruning trees at his home in Hertfordshire. He was born in the shadow of An Gorta Mór and lived to see the dawn of the atomic age. He witnessed Queen Victoria’s empire rise and begin to crumble. He saw Ireland achieve partial independence and watched two world wars devastate Europe. Yet he was no passive observer of history; he helped shape it. Shaw co-founded the Fabian Society, helped establish the Independent Labour Party and contributed to the intellectual foundations of the London School of Economics.

Yet perhaps his greatest achievement was making ideas entertaining. With his phenomenal output of 60 plays, he transformed theatre into a forum where ordinary audiences could confront politics, philosophy and morality without having attended Oxford. He also embodied something enduringly Irish: the belief that language itself can challenge power. Shaw belonged to that remarkable tradition of Irish writers who used wit not merely for amusement but as a weapon against pomposity and injustice. From Swift to Wilde to Shaw, Ireland produced literary rebels who mocked authority while exposing uncomfortable truths. Despite his international fame, Shaw remained unmistakably a Dub—argumentative, brilliant, contrary and impossible to silence. Shaw may have left Ireland, but Ireland never left him. He carried with him its flame of literary brilliance. No line better captures both the man and the nation that shaped him than Shaw’s own reflection on identity and belonging: “Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it.”

Dr David McKinstry is a teacher and poet whose poems are widely published and broadcast across Ireland and in the UK. If any readers wish to share their literary output with him, they can contact him at: davmick38h@yahoo.co.uk