1884–1904: Introduction

Abstract

Looking back from 1903/4, when Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman was published, and his Irish play John Bull’s Other Island proved the breakthrough for the literary drama in London, the Introduction traces the first 20 years of the Fabian Society led by Shaw and Sidney Webb, as they developed a non-Marxist economic basis for socialism. Beatrice Potter researched the London poor and the cooperative movement before marrying Sidney Webb in 1892. Thereafter Shaw worked intensively with both Webbs as they wrote major books on trade unionism and industrial democracy, while he wrote ten plays that completely refashioned British drama. In 1895, they founded the London School of Economics, underwritten in part by Irishwoman Charlotte Payne-Townshend, whom Shaw married in 1898.