Abstract
From Doris Arthur Jones, The Life and Letters of Henry Arthur Jones (London: Victor Gollancz, 1930) p. 221. Shaw’s provocative declaration that he was ‘like Shelley, a Socialist, Atheist and Vegetarian’ (see Sixteen Self Sketches [London: Constable, 1949] p. 58) was made at the first regular meeting of the Shelley Society on 14 April 1886. In his own recollection Shaw claimed that two of ‘the pious old ladies’ whose subscriptions kept Furnivall’s literary societies going were so scandalised by his speech that they ‘resigned on the spot’ (‘Notes by George Bernard Shaw’, Appendix 1 in Wilfred Partington, Thomas J. Wise in the Original Cloth [London: Robert Hale, 1946] pp. 315–16). Henry Arthur Jones (1851–1929) was one of the leading British playwrights of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. He had, in fact, met Shaw at William Archer’s house on 4 May 1885. Shaw wrote highly respectful, if often incisively critical, reviews of Jones’s plays in the Saturday Review, and the friendship between the two survived frequent quarrels before a serious rift over Shaw’s attitude towards the First World War (see below, p. 231). Thomas James Wise (1859–1937) was a celebrated bibliographer and Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, later exposed as a forger, on a grand scale, of nineteenth-century pamphlets.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1990 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wise, T.J. (1990). ‘A Good Shelleyan’: I. In: Gibbs, A.M. (eds) Shaw. Interviews and Recollections Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05402-2_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05402-2_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-05404-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-05402-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)