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British Drama

Notes Political Activism
Influenced by his reading, he became a dedicated Socialist and a charter member of the Fabian
Society, a middle class organization established in 1884 to promote the gradual spread of socialism
by peaceful means. In the course of his political activities he met Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an
Irish heiress and fellow Fabian; they married in 1898. The marriage was never consummated, at
Charlotte’s insistence, though he had had a number of affairs with married women; Shaw declined
to stand as an MP, but in 1897 he was elected as a local councilor to the London County Council as
a Progressive.

In 1906 the Shaws moved into a house, now called Shaw’s Corner, in Ayot St.
Lawrence, a small village in Hertfordshire, England; it was to be their home for
the remainder of their lives, although they also maintained a residence at 29 Fitzroy
Square in London.

Shaw’s plays were first performed in the 1890s. By the end of the decade he was an established
playwright. He wrote sixty-three plays and his output as novelist, critic, pamphleteer, essayist and
private correspondent was prodigious. He is known to have written more than 250,000 letters. Along
with Fabian Society members Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Graham Wallas, Shaw founded the
London School of Economics and Political Science in 1895 with funding provided by private
philanthropy, including a bequest of £20,000 from Henry Hunt Hutchinson to the Fabian Society.
One of the libraries at the LSE is named in Shaw’s honor; it contains collections of his papers and
photographs.

Why did G.B. Shaw beeome a dedicated socialist and a charter member of the Fabian
society.

Last Years and Death
Shaw died there, aged 94, from chronic problems exacerbated by injuries he incurred by falling
from a ladder. During his later years, Shaw enjoyed attending to the grounds at Shaw’s Corner. He
died at the age of 94, of renal failure precipitated by injuries incurred by falling while pruning a
tree. His ashes, mixed with those of his wife, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, were scattered along
footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden.

22.1.2 Work Experience and Literary Works

After working in an estate agent’s office for a while he moved to London as a young man (1876),
where 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. He
began his literary career as a novelist; 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. His earliest dramas were called appropriately Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898).
Among these, Widower’s Houses and Mrs. Warren’s Profession savagely attack social hypocrisy, while
in plays such as Arms and the Man and The Man of Destiny the criticism is less fierce. Shaw’s radical
rationalism, his utter disregard of conventions, his keen dialectic interest and verbal wit often turn
the stage into a forum of ideas, and nowhere more openly than in the famous discourses on the Life
Force, Don Juan in Hell, the third act of the dramatization of woman’s love chase of man, Man and
Superman (1903).

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