Biography Essay

A long life made Shaw's multifaceted activities possible, for he was handicapped by a decadelong false start in fiction, and even more by the circumstances of his upbringing. Born George Bernard Shaw in Dublin on 26 July 1856, he was the third and youngest child and only son of George Carr and Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly Shaw. Technically he belonged to the anachronistic Protestant "ascendancy"—the landed Irish gentry; but his father (first a sinecured civil servant and then an unsuccessful corn merchant) was too impractical and intemperate to sustain anything more than a "downstart" atmosphere of genteel impecuniosity which his son felt was more humiliating than to be born poor and have pretensions to nothing more. After being tutored by a clerical uncle, he attended—briefly—both Protestant and Catholic day schools (the latter an experience repugnant to him in the extreme) and before he...