George Bernard Shaw.pptVIP

George Bernard Shaw Jiang Wenquan 1. His Life and Early Writing: Bernard Shaw, a brilliant dramatist, was born in Dublin, Ireland, of English parentage. With an unhappy childhood, Shaw did not do well at school but he showed much interest in literature. He left school at the age of 14 and started to work in a landagents office where he had much contact with the poor people in Dublin and came to know their miserable life. This experience surely enriched his understanding of the society and the sufferings of the people. In 1876 Shaw gave up his job and went to London, where he devoted much of his time to self-education by wide reading. Between 1879 and 1883, he wrote 5 novels, but none of them brought him profit or fame. 2. Shaws Reform Ideas: Shaw came under the influence of Henry George and William Morris and took an interest in socialist theories. He started to attend all kinds of public meetings and to read Karl Marx in the British Museum. In 1884 Shaw joined the Fabian Society and became one of its most influential members. Together with his fellow Fabians, he regarded the establishment of socialism by the emancipation of land and industrial capital from individual and class ownership as the final goal. But on how to achieve it, he differed greatly from the Marxists. He was against the means of violent revolution or armed struggle in achieving the goal of socialism; he also had a distrust of the uneducated working class in fighting against capitalists. He held that only those superior intellects could have the ability to shoulder this task. And it was his ideal to bring about evolutionary socialism by legal and democratic means, by revealing the evil capitalists and by educating the common people. This reformist view of his caused him a painful, often conscious, inner conflict between his sincere desire for the new world and his inability to break out of the snobbish intellectual isolation throughout his life and work. 3. Sh