Works about Shaw
Shaw wrote "People keep asking me why I do not write my own biography.
I reply that I am not at all interesting biographically. I have never killed anybody... Now I have had no heroic adventures. Things have not happened to me: on the contrary it is I who have happened to the world; and all that happening has taken the form of books and plays.
Read them or spectate them and you have my whole story: the rest is only leather and prunella, breakfast, lunch, dinner, buttoning and unbuttoning, sleeping and wakening and washing, my routine being just the same as everybody's routine." (Shaw Gives Himself Away).
The early days
Born in 1856 in Dublin, Shaw's life spanned an extraordinary century. George and Bessie Shaw were not particularly supportive parents and Shaw wrote later of his 'devil of a childhood.' His nurse would often take him to visit her friends in the Dublin slums.
Not uncommonly, Shaw did not have an extensive schooling, leaving school at fifteen to work as a clerk in a rent collector's office, 'counting other men's money.'
His mother left Dublin in the early 1870s to further her daughters' singing careers in London, following the elusive maestro Vandeleur Lee, who had become a permanent fixture in the Shaw household.
Left in Dublin with only his mother's piano and his father, Shaw taught himself to play. Two years later, in 1873 he set out for London.
Shaw spent the next 20 years reading in the British Museum, developing the ideas which were to find fruit in his plays. He described himself in the 1881 census as a 'novelist' though these five early works were not published until he later found success with his plays.
During this time, Shaw became an admirer of William Morris and spent much time in the Morris household, becoming particularly close to May Morris. Shaw's socialist principles found an outlet in the Fabian Society, which had slightly different ideals from those of Morris; and through which he became acquainted with Sidney (above) and Beatrice Webb the great socialist thinkers and politicians - founders of, among many other things, the London School of Economics the New Statesman.
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