GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

(1856-1950)

George Bernard Shaw, the great English playwright, was the founder of the social realistic drama in English literature. Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in a poor middle-class family. His father had retired from the Department of Justice and the family lived on a small pension.

The boy took lessons of reading and writing from a governess and his uncle gave him some lessons in Latin. In 1867 Bernard Shaw was sent to a college where, as he said later, he had learned nothing.

He attended some other schools and in 1869 entered the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School. When Shaw left school in 1871 he went to work as a clerk in a Dublin estate office. His wa­ges were eighteen shillings a month; his duties were to get the incom­ing letters, to post the outgoing letters and buy lunch for the other clerks. His wages were soon raised and he worked in that office for five years.

Shaw's mother had a nice voice. She moved to London and worked as a teacher of singing there. In 1876 Bernard Shaw decided to fol­low her example and go to London. By that time he had understood that work at an office was impossible for him. He got a good recommendation when he left the office. London was the literary centre of the country and the young man wanted to try himself in writing. His father and mother helped him at that period. From time to time he worked at some offices, but his aim was to be a writer. He wrote artic­les and poems, essays and novels. But very little of it was published. Four novels were written at that time and only the fifth, "An Unsocial Socialist", was published in 1884.

The characters in his plays discuss political events, science, re­ligion, education and economy. Bernard Shaw wrote more than fifty plays. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Bernard Shaw died at his country home in Herdfordshire, on No­vember 2, 1950, at the age of ninety-four.

The creative work of Bernard Shaw is divided into two periods. The first period begins in 1879 and lasts till World War I. His literary work of the period comprises five novels, and a number of pamphlets, critical articles on art, and plays.

The second period of Shaw's creative work began with the end of the war and ended in the middle of the 20th century.

In the works of this period Bernard Shaw goes deeper into poli­tics. Mere criticism of capitalist society is replaced by an attempt to find a way out of social conflicts.