George Bernard Shaw was born in 1856 in Dublin, Ireland. He was the only son of an Anglo-Irish family that belonged to the upper-middle-class Protestant section of Irish society but, despite its status, had little money. Shaw’s father, a civil servant, experienced little professional success. An alcoholic, he neglected Shaw as well as Shaw’s two sisters, as did his wife, so the three were raised mainly by servants. At age 15, after attending several different Irish schools, Shaw took a job as an office boy for Uniacke Townshend and Company, a firm of estate agents; he later became a clerk for this same firm. In 1876 Shaw joined his mother and sisters in London, where they had moved 5 years before, leaving Shaw’s father behind. For several years, Shaw attempted to establish himself as a novelist without much success. He made his mark in other ways, however. Becoming passionately interested in social reform, in 1884 Shaw helped found the Fabian Society, an organization dedicated to the establishment, by gradual stages, of a socialist government in England. During the late 1880s, he began to make a name for himself in the literary world as a music critic, writing for such journals as the London and the World.
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