Bookkeeping about rents, especially those of the very poor, and having to go out to collect some of them, was an early confrontation with economic injustice and the poverty of opportunity. Books—after working hours—compensated for office tedium; especially Charles Dickens, John Bunyan, and Charles Lever; and he discovered William Blake, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley—all rebels and all to be read with some degree of furtiveness. Theater was a joy. Although Dublin productions were largely adaptations of French melodrama and watered-down Shakespeare, Shaw was captivated by the plays of an Irishman who had gone to England and then America to make his fortune, Dion Boucicault. For art there was the National Gallery of Ireland, poor in works of any consequence but an initiation, nevertheless, to a young man whose earliest culture hero was Michelangelo and who had first thought seriously about an artist's vocation.
Music pervaded the Shaw household. His mother had turned for consolation not only to music, but to her music teacher, George John Vandeleur Lee, a mesmeric figure in Dublin music circles. By 1866 Lee shared, at the least, a house in Dublin with the Shaws, and a cottage on Dalkey Hill, overlooking the bay, which provided the young Shaw with the beginnings of a love for nature which Synge Street and Harrington Street could not have inspired.
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