By Peter Gahan
Published in SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, 2026.
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Abstract

This biographical article traces young adult Bernard Shaw’s interactions with Irish—as well as some significant non-Irish—people during his first twenty-two years living in London in order to give an idea of what being Irish meant in the Imperial capital at the end of the nineteenth century. This first part covers the eighteen years from 1876 to just before his first London theatrical success. The second part (to be published in a future issue of SHAW) will begin with that 1894 Avenue Theatre Season and conclude four years later in May and June 1898, when the forty-one-year-old Irish socialist’s life took a completely new turn with the publication of his first two volumes of plays ( Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant), his becoming a full-time dramatist on retiring as a full-time critic, and his marriage to Irishwoman Charlotte Payne-Townshend. Taken together, these Irish connections of the early London years laid the foundations for Shaw’s considerable involvement in Irish affairs, cultural and political, in the first quarter of the twentieth century.