Shaw as a Boy

Abstract

Edward McNulty, ‘George Bernard Shaw as a Boy’, Candid Friend, 6 July 1901. Matthew Edward McNulty (1856–1943) was a fellow-pupil at a school in Aungier Street, the last of the four Shaw attended — he left in 1871 — and was probably Shaw’s only close school friend. After McNulty moved to a job in Newry, the friendship flourished in letters (subsequently destroyed; see below, p. 31) until McNulty returned to Dublin in 1874. The two remained friends after Shaw’s move to London. A forty-nine-page typescript, ‘Memoirs of GBS’, by McNulty, which includes copies of Shaw’s letters to him, is held in the Rare Book Collection of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The article in the Candid Friend presents an abbreviated version of McNulty’s account of his friendship with Shaw in the typescript. Corrections made by Shaw to McNulty’s recollections are preserved in the margin of a typescript copy of the Candid Friend article in the Currall Collection, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. These marginal comments are reproduced below.