SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD ), Irish drama tist, was born in Dublin on July 26, 1856. His father, George Carr Shaw, a younger son of Bernard Shaw, high sheriff of Kilkenny, was an impoverished and humorously helpless member of what, in England, would have been called the middle class, but in Ireland is still called the gentry. He was first employed by the Government in the Four Courts, then the Dublin Law Courts, and when his office was abolished in 185o compounded his pension for a lump sum, with which he became a member of the Dublin Corn Exchange, engaging in a business of which he was totally ignorant, that of a corn merchant. He married Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly, who was the daughter of Walter Bagenal Gurly, a landed proprietor in County Carlow. Three children were born of the marriage, Lucinda Frances, Elinor Agnes and George Bernard.
The financial affairs of the Shaw family did not prosper, but the young wife, who had a mezzo soprano voice of remarkable purity, became known as an amateur singer. There was then in Dublin a gifted conductor and teacher of singing, named George John Vandaleur Lee, with whose work Mrs. Shaw became asso ciated. In this way the Shaw children, despite their father's finan cial straits, acquired a considerable musical culture which was ex tended to the theatre by her amateur operatic performances. Her son, after a private grounding in Latin grammar from his uncle, the Rev. William George Carroll, vicar of St. Bride's, Dublin, who was reputed to be the first minister of the Church of Ire land to proclaim himself a Home Ruler, was like many other Church of Ireland children, sent to the Wesleyan Connexional School, later known as Wesley college, in Dublin, and was "gen erally near or at the bottom of his classes." At home, however, he acquired an extensive acquaintance with the works of com posers of music, so that before he was 15, "he knew at least one important work by Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Gounod from cover to cover." He studied pictures in the National Gallery of Ireland, and at 15 "knew enough of a considerable number of painters to recognize their work at sight." In 1871, when he was 15 and had no hope of going to a uni versity, he received, through the influence of his uncle, Frederick Shaw, an appointment in the office of a Dublin land agent, Charles Uniacke Townshend, at a commencing salary of £18 per annum. At the end of a year, when he was 16, the important post of cashier unexpectedly became vacant, and he was temporarily appointed to it. He filled it so ably that he was confirmed in it,
and his salary, then £24 per annum, was doubled. In 1876, no longer able to endure employment which had always irked him, he withdrew from it and joined his mother, who, some years earlier, had settled in London and become a professional teacher of music. But before he did this he made his first communication to the Press. The American evangelists Moody and Sankey had arrived in Dublin to conduct a revival, and he went to hear them deliver their gospel. After he had heard it he wrote a letter, signed "S," and dated April 3, 1875, to Public Opinion, in which he asserted, to the horror of his pietistic relatives, that if this sort of thing was religion then he, on the whole, was an atheist The first nine years of his life in London were passed in poverty and oppressed to some extent by a sense of failure. His literary earnings in that time amounted to six pounds. "When people reproach me," he wrote in 1896, "with the unfashionableness of my attire, they forget that to me it seems like the raiment of Solomon in all his glory by contrast with the indescribable seedi ness of those days when I trimmed my cuffs to the quick with scissors, and wore a tall hat and soi-disant black coat green with decay." In those nine years, 1876-85, he "devilled" for a musical critic ; began a passion play in blank verse which he did not fin ish; wrote an article for One and All, of which George R. Sims was editor, the payment for which was 1 ss., wrote an article on patent medicines for is, and a verse for a school prizebook for 5s., and composed five novels. He was supported during these nine years by his mother, and by his father, who was still strug gling with his dwindling business on the Dublin Corn Exchange. On a few occasions he endeavoured "to earn an honest living," the last occasion being in 1879, when, for a few months, he was in the service of a company formed in London "to exploit an ingenious invention by Mr. Thomas Alva Edison." Thereafter he insisted on following the bent of his mind. "I did not throw myself into the struggle for life : I threw my mother into it. I was not a staff to my father's old age : I hung on to my father's coat tails. . . . Callous as Comus to moral babble, I steadily wrote my five pages a day and made a man of myself (at my mother's expense) instead of a slave." Such glimpses of London society as he obtained he owed to the possession of a suit of evening clothes and to his being a sufficiently sympathetic ac companist to be tolerated as an amateur in musical circles.