Events

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin of Protestant Irish stock on July 26, 1856. His mother, Lucille Elizabeth (Bessie) Gurly, was a talented amateur singer, and his father, George Carr Shaw, was a corn trader. Shaw was the third and youngest child (and only son) of his parents. Technically, he belonged to the Protestant ‘ascendancy’ – the landed Irish gentry – but his impractical father was first a sinecured civil servant and then an unsuccessful grain merchant.

George Bernard Shaw grew up in an atmosphere of genteel poverty, which to him was more humiliating than being merely poor.

He had two elder sisters, Lucille Frances (Lucy) who became a singer, and Elinor Agnes (Yuppy), who died of T.B. in 1876 at the age of 21.

Shaw later complained that he hated Dublin, that his home life had been unhappy and felt neglected. Of his father, he wrote that he was, in principle, an ardent teetotaler.

Unfortunately, his conviction in this matter was founded on personal experience. He was the victim of drink neurosis – a miserable affliction quite unconvincing and accompanied by torments of remorse and shame.

Of his mother, he wrote, "Technically speaking, I should say she was the worst mother conceivable, always, however, within the limits of the fact that she was incapable of unkindness….she went her own way with so complete a disregard and even unconsciousness of convention and scandal and prejudice, that it was impossible to doubt her good faith and innocence."

When he was too young, so many times he visited slums with his servant. She also took him into the public house bars where he was regaled with lemonade and ginger beer, but he did not enjoy it because his father’s eloquence on the evil of the drink had given him an impression that a public house was a wicked place where he should not have been taken.