I
George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, July 26, 1856. His paternal
grandfather, Bernard Shaw, was high sheriff of County Kilkenny, and
his maternal grandfather, Walter Bagnall Gurley, a county ’squire and
fox hunter, with an extensive, but entailed estate. Shaw’s father
was a younger son and, in consequence, no millionaire. But that he
was a pauper or that the dramatist, in his youth, was attracted to
vegetarianism because, as James Huneker hints, cabbages are cheaper
than venison, there is no reason to believe. When the family came to
London, in 1876, it took up quarters in “a well furnished house in a
pleasant part” of the city. This upon the authority of Mr. Stanley
Shaw, a relative, in a letter to the New York _Sun_, dated Berlin,
April 25, 1905.
The Shaws then, were country gentlemen, and in all probability
little different from the other Irish gentry about them. The son of
the younger son was educated and reared in the orthodox fashion. He
learned the speech of the Irish aristocracy and the foreign tongues
in favor--English, French, and maybe a bit of German; he mastered
the three R’s, he studied the history of his country, and went to
church. “When I was a little boy,” he says in his essay “On Going
to Church,” “I was compelled to go on Sunday; and though I escaped
from that intolerable bondage before I was ten, it prejudiced me so
violently against church-going that twenty years elapsed before, in
foreign lands and in pursuit of works of art, I became once more a
church-goer. To this day, my flesh creeps when I recall that genteel
suburban Irish Protestant church, built by Roman Catholic workmen who
would have considered themselves damned had they crossed its threshold
afterward....” A virtuous, commonplace family. Its present head, says
the Mr. Stanley Shaw aforesaid, “is Major Sir Frederick Shaw, Bart.,
D. S. O. of Bushey Park, Dublin.” A respectable, well-sounding name and
address.