George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856, the youngest child of George Carr and Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw. His mother was an opera singer and voice trainer; his father was an unsuccessful businessman and alcoholic who could not pull his family out of poverty, in spite of belonging to the genteel class of Protestant Irish gentry. Shaw once described himself as a "downstart," one whose family had come down in the world. When Shaw was twenty, he moved to London with his mother. Lucinda earned the family's living with her music; Shaw wrote five unsuccessful novels and furthered his education through reading. Music was central to his world and would later come to be essential to his plays.

Shaw entered the theatrical world as a critic, writing music reviews for various papers until asked to write drama criticism for the Saturday Review in 1894. He also wrote...