A leading surgeon in Dublin had a patient with a squint. The good doctor tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to cure his patient. They had something in common - famous sons. The doctor’s son was Oscar Wilde, and the patient’s G. Bernard Shaw.  To what extent the senior Shaw contributed to his son’s becoming who he did is big question mark. For he had not done too well for himself and consequently had hit the bottle. His mother pursued her own career, that of a professional singer, passionately. She, along with her daughter, left Shaw to fend for himself at the age of sixteen and left home to devote herself to singing, which later became her daughter’s career too. Shaw living with his father was still at school and as times were bad also held a part time clerical job. He nursed an intense dislike for both his occupations.

Having tried living with one parent, Shaw left his father and moved in with his mother in London in 1876. Warm, fed and having a roof over his head at her expense, he followed his heart’s wish, that of writing. He tried his hand at prose and his first novel titled Immaturity emerged.  A reflection of himself at that stage of his life, one would wonder. He wrote four more novels before even one was published. Having a voracious appetite for reading, he devoured books at the British Museum Library.

Shaw’s next step, politics, was inevitable as he had passionate views on the goings on in the country.  His early attempts at public speaking, which undoubtedly must have honed his oratory skills, were in parks and street corners. And as it happens all this was reflected in his writings.

Bernard Shaw was totally caught up with the idea of socialism. He wanted Britain to become a socialist state, peacefully with systematic legislation. Towards this aim, he along with Beatrice and Sidney Webb gave birth to the Fabian Society. The foundation for the Labour Party was laid, for it was this society that later founded the London School of Economics and the Labour party. Shaw’s contribution to the Fabian Society included lectures, writing informative pieces that were distributed as pamphlets and any other activity that would further the cause of the society.

Notable writings for the society were The Perfect Wagnerite and The Quintessence of Ibsenism. His writings also encompassed critical reviews about music, theatre and art.  For these, he preferred using either his initials GBS or a pseudonym - Corno di Bassetto. His reviews were collected and organised into several volumes - Music In London 1890-1894 (3 vols. 1931); Pen Portraits and Reviews (1931); and Our Theatres in the Nineties (3 vols. 1931).

His first play saw the light of day in 1891. Called Widower’s Houses, it was the first of the dozen or so plays that he wrote after that. Not many saw production on stage at that time. One of his plays - Mrs Warren's Profession which was produced, fell to the censor’s scissors. Undoubtedly the censors were around in those days too! Many of plays however saw single performances, which were privately produced. He also wrote fiction like The Black Girl in Search of God and some Lesser Tales and Cashel Byron's Profession.

Wedding bells rang in 1898, when he married Charlotte Payne-Townsend, an Irish lady. Now he moved out of his mother’s house to set up an independent establishment, which he could afford, as his wife was wealthy.  A few years after 1904 were good for Shaw’s plays. With Shaw directing a few, many of his plays were produced under the aegis of an experimental theatre. The next ten years saw many of his plays, some written specifically for that particular theatre, on stage. This, besides bringing him fame, brought him financial gains too. All this while, his activities on the political front did not cease. He, in fact, used the political platform to further the interests of drama.

Come 1914 and the outbreak of war and Shaw gave vent to his feelings on the issue in his writings that appeared in the newspaper in a series of articles called Common Sense About the War. His strong views brought him ill repute in political circles and he was even called a traitor. He poured his feelings into Heartbreak House, a play which mirrored his bitterness and despair about the political and social scene of Britain in those days.

Back to Methuselah, a series of five plays and Saint Joan, another play, rebuilt his reputation in the days after the war. The year 1925 witnessed Bernard Shaw being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He donated the cash that comes with the award to the cause of a Swedish playwright, August Strindberg.

Now Shaw was a well-known and respected name in Britain. His plays crossed the ocean and were staged in the United States too.  His international stature immediately translated to involvement in world politics. He was invited for lectures by to the Soviet Union and also by the United States. Despite all these activities, he continued writing profusely.  

An accidental fall off a ladder, in 1950, brought this illustrious life to an end. He was 94 then and had been working on a play Why She Would Not. The pen that gave us insights into his thoughts in the form of How to Settle the Irish Question (1917) and The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928) stopped writing, but after giving us the masterpieces Pygmalion, Candida and Arms and The Man.

A rich man when he died, Shaw had willed a large part of his estate to be dedicated to the cause of revamping the English alphabet. He wanted to revamp the alphabet because of the many illogical twists it had. Here’s an example of his reasoning – ‘ghoti’, he said should be pronounced ‘fish’. This can be achieved by the ‘gh’ being pronounced as in ‘enough’, i.e., ‘f; the ‘o’ as in ‘women’ i.e., ‘i’; the ‘ti’ as in ‘nation’ i.e., ‘sh’. Well, you have your ‘fish’! As per his wishes, his version of Androcles and the Lion using the Shaw alphabet, was published, but as luck would have it, it was not received well.  After this, the other beneficiaries of his estate the National Gallery of Ireland, the British Museum and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art were given portions of his estate.