Shaw biography

Early years

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 and worked as a clerk between 1871 and 1876. He moved to London aged twenty. His early years there, between 1876 and 1884, were filled with frustration and poverty. During this period, he depended on his mother's income as a music teacher and a pound a week sent by his father from Dublin (he said, later, “I did not throw myself into the struggle for life: I threw my mother into it”).

Shaw spent his days in the British Museum reading room writing novels and reading, and his evenings attending lectures and debates by the middle class intelligentsia. He became a socialist and a skilful orator. He became a vegetarian in 1881 in the hope of curing his chronic migraine headaches. A driving force behind the Fabian Society, he threw himself into committee work, wrote socialist pamphlets, and spoke to crowds several times a week. Shaw began his journalism career as a book reviewer and art, music, and drama critic, always downgrading the artificialities and hypocrisies he found in those arts.

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