Question- Describe life and works of Bernard Shaw.

Answer -

Life and Works: George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin on July 26, 1856. His father was second cousin to a baronet and his mother was the daughter of a gentleman. The tough fibre in his character no doubt came from his mother's side, but the mercurial humour was decidedly an inheritance from an otherwise ineffective father. For Bernard Shaw makes no secret of the fact that while his father's improvidence and shiftlessness would have marred him for ever, it was his mother's courage and uncomplaining patience that was the making of him.

About his education we know that his school life was not happy. As he himself says, "My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever", says he. It appears that he was sent to the Wesleyan Connexional school, but the school had never any attraction for or influence on him. As he himself says, I was never in a school where the teachers cared enough about me, or about their ostensible profession, or had enough conviction and cruelty to take any such trouble; so I learnt nothing at school, not even what I could and would have learnt if any attempt had been made to interest me." (Preface to Immaturity). He attributes his education not to his teachers and his school, but to himself and his environments.

Bernard Shaw is never tired of disparging his parasitic youth; he calls himself "a stupendously selfish artist learning with the full weight of his hungry body on an energetic and capable woman." [i.e. his mother.]. But from actual details we get a quite different picture. When he was thirteen he was running after a job. A friend of the family gave him an introduction to a firm of cloth merchant and one of the partners was fixing up an employment for him when the other interfered and said that he was too young for the job. A year later however, an uncle secured a berth for him in the office of "a leading and terribly respectable firm of land agents" as their office boy at eighteen shillings a month. The atmosphere of the office was an uncommercial as that of an office can be, and here, as he says, he learnt "business habits without being infected with the business spirit." It seems that he acquitted himself with considerable credit at the job, seeing that very soon he was called upon to be the cashier of the firm, and his salary was raised to $ 48 a year, which at sixteen years of age, was quite a handsome salary even in his own estimation. Here he continued for some four years, but he detested the work and in March, 1876, he gave a month's notice and threw up his job. "After enjoying", he says, "for a few days the luxury of not having to go to office, and being, if not my own master, at least not nay one else's slave, I packed a carpet bag. boarded the north wall boat, and left the train next morning at Euston," i.e. London.

He began his efforts at earning as a musical critic in a paper called The Hornet, which however, soon came to an end. Then in 1879 a cousin, Mr. Cashel Hoey, gave him an introduction to Arnold White, then Secretary to the Edison Telephone Company, and the latter found a berth for him in the Way Leave Department of that Company. Here he remained for seven months, until the company was swallowed up by the Bell Telephone Company. This was the end of his commercial career and soon he gave up all search for it, except for a day or two in 1881 when he earned a few pounds by counting the votes at an election in Leyton.

An episode in Shaw's life was his marriage with Miss Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend, "a charming Irish millionairess with green eyes," on June 1, 1889. She was an ardent Socialist, and a devoted admirer of Shaw and perhaps the only conquest of his of which he does not bring in public.

In 1897, the Devil's Disciple had run for 64 performances, and brought Shaw $ 2500 in royalities. It placed him on his high- road to wealth from which he has strayed neither to the left nor to the right. The first fruit of this prosparity was his ability to resign his journalistic drudgery, and in 1899, he surrendered his position of dramatic critic on the Saturday Review to Max Beerhohm. Of course, it was not all smooth sailing. For one thing producers and actors did not take kindly to Shavism. Thus the drama "You Never Can Tell" was rejected by the manager and actors of Haymarket Theatre, though Ailsa Craig (daughter of Ellen Terry) pronounced it to be "the best play written for years." Shaw then thought of appealing to a wider audience, and with this object he took to publishing his plays with elaborate stage- directions, and with prefaces which were more like pamphlets. These were more popular, but at the end of the nineteenth century, Shaw was still definitely ostracised from the London regular theatres."

The award of the Nobel Prize in 1926 was only a fitting recognition of one who was without doubt the most outstanding figure in European Literature of the age. In his later years he had been increasingly concerned with the problem of religion in some form or other but the two outstanding productions of these years were political, the drama. "The Aple Cart," and the disquisition "An Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism," which has become also a classic for the intelligent man as well. He lived a retired life to genial old age at his home and died in 1950.

Chief Works:

(a) Novel:

1. Immaturity (1879) 2. The Irrational Knot (1880); 3. Love among the Artists (1881); 4. Cashel Byron's Profession (1882); 5. An Unsocial Socialist (1883).

(b) On Socialism Fabian Tracts (1884-96): Fabianism and the Fiscal Question (1904); The Case for Equality (1913); An Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism (1928).

(c) On Art and Literature :

1. The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891); 2. The Perfect Wagnerite (1898); 3. The Sanity of Art (1908).

(d) The Dramas:

1. Widower's Houses (1893); 2. The Philanderer (1893); 3. Mrs. Warren's Profession (1894); 4. Arms and the Man (1894); 5. Candida (1894); 6. The Man of Destiny (1895); 7. You Never Can Tell (1896); 8. The Devil's Disciple (1897); 9. Caesar and Cleopatra (1898); 10. Captain Brass Bound's Conversion (1899); 11. Man and Superman (1901-3); 12. John Bull's Other Island (1904); 13. How She Lied to Her Husband (1904);
14. Major Barbara (1905); 15. The Doctor's Dilemma (1906); 16. Getting Married (1908); 17. The Showing-up of Balnco Posnet (1909); 18: The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1910); 19. Misalliance (1910); 20. Fanny's First play (1911); 21. Androcles and the Lion (1912); 22. Over-ruled (1912); 23. Pygmalion (1912); 24. Heartbreak House & C. (1919); 25. Back to Methuselah (1921); 26. St. Joan (1924); 27. The Apple Cart (1929); 28. Too True to be Good (1932).

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