George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland on July 26, 1856, the youngest child of George Carr, a civil servant and merchant, and Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly Shaw. He briefly attended Protestant and Catholic day schools but received most of his schooling at home, tutored by his clerical uncle who focused heavily on music and painting. At sixteen, he began work in a land agent's office, where he kept the books and collected rents from the poor. It was in this capacity that Shaw observed firsthand the injustices of poverty. He spent free time at the Dublin theatre, viewing French melodrama, Shakespeare, and local Irish playwrights.

Shaw followed his mother to London in 1876 when he was twenty and moved in with her and his sister, along with his mother's music teacher. For the next nine years, he experienced a genteel poverty, living on his mother's pound a week...