George Bernard Shaw 1856–1950, Utopian to the End: Farfetched Fables

Abstract

George Bernard Shaw died on 2 November 1950, a little over three months past his ninety-fourth birthday. His wife had died seven years before and his oldest friend and Fabian associate, Sidney Webb, three years earlier. Born in 1856 at the height of the Victorian Age, Shaw lived through the passing of the Victorian and Edwardian years, the two World Wars, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, and the implementation of the Welfare State in England. Ironically, after the implementation of the Welfare State that he had worked for all his life, Shaw became obsessed with the idea that he was being taxed into penury.¹ Nor was this his only mania. He was also obsessed with what he felt was the prodigious waste of time that accrued from using the twenty-six-letter alphabet, and was assiduous in his campaign to have it replaced by a phonetic alphabet of at least forty letters: “He calculated that, in writing and printing superfluous letters, our ‘ancient Phoenician alphabet’ cost us the price of a fleet of battleships every year.”² At his death his Will provided a significant portion of his income to the establishment of a fund to create a new English alphabet along with the translation of a number of literary classics, including two plays of his own, to demonstrate its effectiveness. Additionally, the ideas that had preoccupied him for at least half a century—particularly the theory of Creative Evolution and the movement of the species toward omniscience and omnipotence—remained unaltered by the recent disaster of the war.