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    Pygmalion
    Pygmalion
    Pygmalion
    Ebook201 pages2 hours

    Pygmalion

    By George Bernard Shaw

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    About this ebook

    Enriched Classics offer readers accessible editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and commentary. Each book includes educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work.

    An idealistic professor transforms an unsophisticated Cockney girl into a refined young lady in this classic drama set in turn-of-the-century London.

    This edition includes:
    -A concise introduction that gives readers important background information
    -A chronology of the author's life and work
    -A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context
    -An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations
    -Detailed explanatory notes
    -Critical analysis including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work
    -Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction
    -A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience

    Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateDec 18, 2012
    ISBN9781451686739
    Author

    George Bernard Shaw

    George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 and moved to London in 1876. He initially wrote novels then went on to achieve fame through his career as a journalist, critic and public speaker. A committed and active socialist, he was one of the leaders of the Fabian Society. He was a prolific and much lauded playwright and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in 1950.

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    Reviews for Pygmalion

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      Pygmalionby George Bernard Shaw 1916Washington Square Press 3.9 / 5When Henry Higgins, a linguist, meets cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle, he makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can teach her to speak such perfect English that she could pass as a duchess in polite High Society.He forgets that Eliza is an independent woman, and will not be bought and coddled. Classified under the genre of romance by many, to me, it was also a study of class relations and the perceptions and attitudes towards gender that were prevailing at that time, early 1900's. I really enjoyed the book, but gave it only 3.9 stars. Why? Henry Higgins. The characters are so well developed with a depth and diversity, I felt an instant understanding of them. I just did not like Higgins. At all.This was first a stage play, introduced to the public in 1913, and first printed in 1914. This went on to be the musical 'My Fair Lady' and is an unforgettable book.
    • 3/5
      Come on, it is classic ! The story is pretty simple, though truly charming. I wish I was Eliza Doolittle !
    • 5/5
      Utterly fantastic - one of my favourite plays. Though really...Eliza should have married Henry.
    • 2/5
      An interesting play, I call it. It is much like the movie /My Fair Lady/. It’s fairly short.
    • 3/5
      Leuk en vlot, spitse dialogen. Sociaal document: moeilijkheid van klasse te doorbreken. Verwijzingen naar Frankenstein zeer duidelijk
    • 4/5
      I found myself very interested in this play. I knew a lot about it before reading it, but that didn't stop me being interested. It was funny, well written and I enjoyed it a lot.
    • 5/5
      Man, I loved this play. Reminded me of Oscar Wilde - so much, actually, that I was surprised when I looked Shaw up and he apparently wasn't gay. It's really, really funny. And smart. Awesome shit, man. Awesome shit.
    • 4/5
      Other than the amusing OCD-ness of Shaw's (pages of) stage directions, I found this an enjoyable play. Though My Fair Lady did stick very close, almost word for word, to this play, I thought that many of the characters were made more jovial and positive in the film. Higgins particularly is very serious in the play and sticks to his ways; in the film his character becomes softer and less strict.There are also a number of similarities with Shakespeare's 'Taming of the Shrew'; Higgins tames Eliza in a similar fashion. The ending of the play is frustrating. Shaw doesn't round it off in the play scrip, but in an added prose piece at the end.
    • 4/5
      I went into this warily because My Fair Lady has been a favorite movie. The preface sets the tone for the sharp commentary on Britain's class system. The play itself will be very familiar to anyone who has seen My Fair Lady. What wasn't familiar was the ending and here's where I found the most delight. My Fair Lady would have been a very different and much more interesting movie had it ended the way Shaw wanted.
    • 4/5
      I loved this play but I found the ending so very unsatisfying. It is so abrupt and unfinished. It feels like he simply stopped writing in the middle of a thought and just walked away.
    • 3/5
      I didn't like the attached ending in the book. There was no real need to go into what happens to Eliza after the play ends.
    • 4/5
      This is the delightful play that My Fair Lady was based upon. The characters jump off the page, the action is swift, and the story irresitable. The ending is very strange, since it is all told in narrative, unlike the rest of the story which is a script.
    • 3/5
      One of the few plays listed in my catalog. I've never spent much time looking into this side of literature - a shame, considering what's out there. I read - several times - this play simply because I had to, for the engrossing OU course "Introduction to the Humanities." A lot of it has stuck with me, and probably because of the exposure. Nicely done, GBS.
    • 2/5
      I'm not sure how I would feel about this book now, but as a high school freshman, this was the last thing I wanted to read.
    • 4/5
      For those of us who are familiar only with the movie version titled My Fair Lady, the real story of this play might come as something of a surprise. It did to me! I don't want to spoil anything, but it's fascinating to see how the version starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn was changed to please its audience in 1964. Apparently the end of the play has been a tug-of-war between George Bernard Shaw and the public (and some critics) since its first performance in 1912. I have to say I'm with the public... sorry, George.This LA Theatre production is a live play that was recorded to create an audio performance. So along with the excitement and energy of a live recording, you also get the flaws: different volume levels as the actors move toward or away from the microphones, audience applause, etc. But, taking it for what it is, I enjoyed it very much. It is brilliantly acted; Shannon Cochran as Eliza is especially good. I also liked the actor who plays Mr. Doolittle, and really everyone performs well. It was fun to imagine the actors on a stage rather than in front of a microphone in a recording studio. The play is very witty and nonsensical, abounding in comic misunderstandings and hilarious reversals of cultural norms. It is, in a word, George Bernard Shaw. And yet for all its fun, it does address serious issues such as women's independence and the strict social class system that based so much of its value judgments on external accoutrements (like a person's accent). Very little is safe from Shaw's satirical eye, but somehow his characters escape being cardboard cutouts displaying particular vices. They're attractive and fun, even the selfish ones. It's the good humor behind everything that does it.Though this is certainly no studio production, it was very enjoyable. I'm not really one for reading plays; they are designed to be experienced as a performance, not a silent reading. If you can't see a play, the next-best thing is to hear it. I recommend it!
    • 4/5
      Here is the play that "My Fair Lady" was based on. Written by George Bernard Shaw in 1916, this is story of a bet between to bachelor linguists - on if they can make a flower girl sound like Duchess, and pass her off as one at an important party.This book mostly focuses on Professor Henry Higgins. While Liza, the flower girl, is present and finally becomes a much larger character by the end, Mr. Higgins really doesn't get why he is an ass, even his mother thinks so. There are certainly funny bits, especially with Clara spouting very crass slang, thinking its "in style". I especially liked the "sequel", which explains what happens to the main characters- the Bachelor Henry Higgins stays a bachelor in this story, but I found the ending to be very enlightening in what Shaw saw in his characters. This book is rather more satirical and dark than the musical it inspired. Its an easy fun read.
    • 5/5
      Well done ensemble recording of this famous play. I particularly appreciated the fact that Shaw's commentary (both before and after the play) and stage directions (for the most part) were included.I was a little surprised by Shaw's exposition explaining that Eliza does NOT end up marrying Higgins but Freddy!!! His description of what results from this marriage is satirical in tone but he is quite definite in this sequel to the events of the play.
    • 4/5
      Thought-provoking play where Higgins as a bet takes on a common flower-seller and trains her to pass as a 'lady'. Interesting 'sequel' where Shaw explains why Higgins and Eliza would never work as a romantic couple, and telling how Eliza lived beyond the play's ending.
    • 5/5
      Pygmalion, in my opinion, is Shaw's piece de resistance (if that is how you spell it). It is a masterpiece. While I can simply leave it at that I am compelled to say a lot more about this play, but first, the plot.Two English gentlemen (and when I read this book I wondered if it was implied that they were homosexual) bet as to whether they can take a street urchin and turn her into a lady by teaching her how to speak proper English. They do and the experiment is successful, and the bet is won. However the problem is that the woman, Eliza, is left in a difficult position as despite the fact that she is now educated, she is still a woman and has all the rights of a woman - which is none. So, while Henry Higgins has proven that he can turn a street urchin into a lady, she is still a woman and is left in the situation that she cannot do anything with the education that she now has.This play is an attack upon education and upon the status of women in early 20th Century England. They simply had no rights and while they could learn and they could appear to move among the gentry, the fact that they were women relegated them to a second class status. It is said that the system of education was one of the areas that Shaw attacked in his plays, and in this play we see how despite Liza having an education, she knows that she can do nothing with it, and is not recognised as having an education.This play has spawned a lot of duplicates, one of them being a play by Willy Russell called Educating Rita. I read that book in year 11 when I returned to high school and my English teacher loved it because he believed that it showed us how an education can change us. After reading Pygmalion I believed that that play was left for dead (and still do). However there are differences, namely that the status of women in the mid-twentieth century had changed dramatically. However, the theme is still the same, in that a woman from the working class, through education, was able to lift herself out of the working class.Another spawn would be an Eddie Murphy movie called Trading Places. Here two incredibly wealthy men make a bet that they could turn a bum into a successful Wall Street Trader, and turn the successful Wall Street Trader into a common criminal. Like Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, they succeed, but further, they have no understanding of the power of education, because after turning the bum into a successful trader, they realise that they cannot simply send him back to the streets. He has become educated, and in becoming educated he has the power to fight back, which he does so successfully.It is a shame that Shaw has disappeared into relative obscurity. I do not see any of his plays being performed (though being stuck in the little backwater that is Adelaide means that we see very little in the way of good theatre, or more correctly, what I consider good theatre). Still, beggars can't be choosers, but the educated have the world at their doorstep.
    • 4/5
      Amusing play with some funny dialogue and enjoyable characters, but what really elevates it is the portions that Shaw wrote out demonstrating that he knew what the expectations of the audience were and how foolish such genre cliches often are. Awareness of his material and the average reader's thought process allows Shaw to force you to think more critically about what you've just consumed, which is always a plus in my book.
    • 4/5
      A geniunely funny and charming play, with a fascinating message about the function of manners with regards to a class-based society. The characters are lovable and entertaining, even if some of them are more human than others. Higgins will always be amusing to watch, no matter how you slice it: he is an immature, overly-cultured little boy whose intellect so eclipses emotion that, to him, intellectual pursuits are passion. Eliza is also fun, after she somehow develops a sharp mind with Higgins' cultivation.However, I had one major criticism that almost ruined the entire play for me. Call me a swooning, hormonal romantic, but I really wanted Eliza and Higgins to get together in the end! I perfectly understand Shaw's explanation at the end about how they could never have married because not only is Higgins not the marrying type due to the admiration he holds for his mother, but because Eliza refuses to submit herself to him, to be the Galatea to his Pygmalion. But still, all that chemistry seems like so much of waste when she goes and marries Freddy, that love-struck milquetoast. I couldn't help but write a mental fanfiction about Eliza's private fantasy about Higgins comes true, in which they are stuck on a remote island together and she seduces him into "making love like any other man." Guess that's just the hopeless romance-whore in me.
    • 4/5
      A lovely, lovely story well-written, amusing, wonderful characters. A modern classic.
    • 3/5
      George Bernard Shaw's play that was later adapted into My Fair Lady for stage and film. The plot turns on how the way a person speaks sets their social status; changing their speech allows a person to move in different circles. There is more depth in the social commentary, hinging on whether the changeling will be happy in their new circumstances, but the play is an enjoyable comedy at several levels. Read August 2011.
    • 4/5
      One of my favorite works of British theater. A funny story with a sad ending. I love the deep characters and epic storyline underneath the comedy.Though normally I like to read the book first, I was grateful for having seen the movie already while reading this play. Audrey Hepburn is truly the essence of Eliza.I can't really say that "Pygmalion" was better or worse than "My Fair Lady" (the movie adaptation) because they were nearly identical. The script might as well have been read from George Bernard Shaw's writing itself. Shaw has very intricate, detailed descriptions about all the scenes and emotions of each scene, which I loved. It made this book feel somewhere in between a work of theater and a work of fiction. And, like the dialogue, the movie seemed to have followed these descriptions down to the last lace curtain.A charming, highly enjoyable piece of literature.
    • 4/5
      I'm a huge fan of My Fair Lady, so this was an interesting experience. The two are very similar, though MFL added and expanded on scenes and left some out. The ending of Pygmalion was far more ambiguous than MFL, however Eliza appears to have become more independent than in the musical. I still prefer MFL, but this was pleasant.
    • 5/5
      "I'm a good girl I am!" Required reading for every "My Fair Lady" fan. I think this is one example of the play/movie doing justice to the author's original work!
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this particular edition as it includes a "sequel". I have read this before but probably never with so much attention. The "learned Bernard" packs so much in 150 pages it would take one months to study the play thoroughly. Was it about class and gender, ignited by the memory of the changes brought about by the Great War? Or was it something more far-reaching, more contemporary, more futuristic?
    • 5/5
      Although he based the tales in Metamorphoses on existing stories, Ovid presents them with a freshness and originality that made them uniquely his own. His writing is vivid, elegant, and succinct, with the stories including "Pygmalion"generally moving swiftly from beginning to end without tedious digressions or inflated language. Metamorphoses was highly popular with readers of the Augustan age (27 BC to AD 14, when Caesar Augustus ruled the Roman Empire) and became one of the best read books of the Renaissance, influencing Shakespeare and other prominent writers. The themes and motifs are as timely today as they were 2,000 years ago. In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures that came to life and was a popular subject for Victorian era English playwrights, including one of Shaw's influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story in 1871, called Pygmalion and Galatea. Shaw also would have been familiar with the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed. It is with this background that George Bernard Shaw took up this myth and made it his own with the first performance occurring in April, 1914. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence.Like all of Shaw's plays the wordplay is a delight rivaling Shakespeare in that realm.
    • 4/5
      The play on which the musical 'My Fair Lady' is based. Two eminent linguists agree to educate a lower-class flower-girl and turn her into a lady. Excellent portrayal of the class-consciousness of the early 20th century, with some humour and great characterisations. Thought-provoking.
    • 5/5
      This play has been a favourite of mine, and, somehow, I identified with the heroine. Having learnt English as a foreign language was an interesting experience, and, like her, I could not unlearn what I had taken great pains to learn. So when she decided to take action against her tutors, she was on an equal footing, because she had really become a 'lady', but in one of her tutor's eyes, she was still a flower-selling girl. It was wrong of them to think that their teaching would have for sole consequence a change of language and behaviour, as the transformation had gone deeper than that. The musical movie based on it is 'My fair lady', but is more American than English. Nonetheless, to read and see both is quite a good way to see how the play was understood. The play is highly recommended.

    Book preview

    Pygmalion - George Bernard Shaw

    title

    CONTENTS

    INTRODUCTION

    CHRONOLOGY OF GEORGE BERNARD SHAW’S LIFE AND WORK

    HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF Pygmalion

    PYGMALION

    PREFACE TO Pygmalion

    ACT I

    ACT II

    ACT III

    ACT IV

    ACT V

    SEQUEL

    NOTES

    INTERPRETIVE NOTES

    CRITICAL EXCERPTS

    QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

    SUGGESTIONS FOR THE INTERESTED READER

    Acknowledgment is made to The Society of Authors on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate for permission to reprint Pygmalion.

    A NOTE ABOUT THE TEXT

    Readers will notice numerous variations from standard American usage in spelling, punctuation, contractions, etc. To have edited these variations would have destroyed not only the authenticity of the text, but an insight into Shaw’s lifelong contempt for the restraints of convention, even when they applied in so mildly a controversial area as writing mechanics.

    The Editors

    INTRODUCTION

    Pygmalion:

    GALATEA TALKS BACK

    The original story of Pygmalion is drawn from Greek mythology. A sculptor who mistrusted the virtue of women, Pygmalion kept to himself, devoting himself to his art. One day he created a statue of a woman. She was so beautiful, and the sculptor so lonely, that he fell in love with his creation and prayed to the goddess Aphrodite to give him a wife who resembled the statue. Instead, the goddess brought the statue itself to life. The ancient writer Apollodorus, telling his earlier version of the myth, called this statue-turned-woman Galatea.

    George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion is a modern-day retelling of this myth that transforms Galatea from a silent statue to a vibrantly independent woman who talks back to the very teacher who criticizes her speech. Shaw’s Galatea, Eliza Doolittle, is a spirited working girl who, in learning to speak like a duchess, displays a fierce intelligence and independence. But Shaw had another reason for writing Pygmalion, one that brought him much closer to its mythic origins: his unconsummated passion for the actress Mrs. Patrick (Stella) Campbell. He had seen Campbell play Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet fifteen years earlier, and had vowed, like Henry Higgins, to teach that rapscallionly flower girl something. It was with the vision of Stella Campbell before him—the infinitely moldable yet independent actress—that he created Eliza Doolittle. On an afternoon in June 1912, he read Pygmalion aloud to Mrs. Campbell, and by his own account fell in love with her. In a characteristically unsentimental touch, he confessed that this mad love lasted for very nearly 36 hours, but when the play opened in London in 1914, Stella Campbell played Eliza despite being thirty years older than the character.

    Shaw’s feelings for his two main characters were complicated. Henry Higgins is not unlike Shaw himself—brilliant, articulate, and more passionate about his work than anything else. Like Shaw, he is unusually close to his mother and largely uninterested in romance. He can be charming when he wants something, but when he doesn’t get what he wants, he can be petulant, arrogant, and bullying. Though it’s clear by the end of the play that Higgins is attached to Eliza, he absolutely refuses to make any declaration of love to her. Like Pygmalion, Higgins congratulates himself on creating a woman, but unlike the lovelorn sculptor, he refuses to treat her any better than he treats anyone else.

    By the time Shaw wrote Pygmalion in 1912, he had already produced his incisive comedies Mrs. Warren’s Profession and Major Barbara. Though they punctured pretension and exposed hypocrisy with typical Shavian wicked wit, high intellectual passion, and boundless energy, their initial reception by English critics was cool. Having observed that it was only after his plays became successes in Europe that the English came to appreciate them, Shaw produced Pygmalion in Vienna and Berlin in 1913 before trying it out in London. After its production there in 1914, it became one of Shaw’s most popular and frequently produced plays. The 1938 film version gave the play a wider audience and won an Academy Award for its script (cowritten by Shaw). Today Shaw’s play is probably best known as the basis for the musical My Fair Lady, a huge success on Broadway and, later, as a Hollywood film starring Audrey Hepburn as Eliza. Had Shaw lived to see it, it is doubtful he would have approved of the musical and its sentimental romantic ending. To return to the original is slightly shocking. Despite the enormous changes in women’s status and the conventions of romantic love, it remains stubbornly complex, teasing and troubling to us, even in the midst of our laughter.

    The Life and Work of George Bernard Shaw

    George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 26, 1856. In 1872 his mother left his father and took their two daughters to London to live with her music teacher. Shaw stayed in Dublin and left school at fifteen to work as a junior clerk in an office. At twenty, Shaw joined his mother in London, where he lived in poverty for ten years and educated himself in the reading room of the British Museum. He wrote five unsuccessful novels and began to ghostwrite music criticism. He later calculated that during those years he made a grand total of £10 (about $30) from writing.

    Finally, during the 1880s, he made a name for himself as a critic of music, art, and the theater. As a drama critic, Shaw attacked the fashionable plays of the time. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) he championed their shocking alternative: the work of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, whose plays critiqued the hypocrisy of middle-class life. Shaw’s politics at the time were radical: he became a vegetarian, a socialist, and a supporter of women’s rights. He was also an early member of the Fabian Society, a group of middle-class socialists who advocated peaceful change rather than revolution. Shaw became a powerful activist for this cause, in such volumes as Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889).

    Influenced by Ibsen, Shaw produced his first play, Widowers’ Houses, in 1892. His next play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, was a sharp comedy about a wealthy woman who had made her fortune as a prostitute; the play examined the hypocrisy of powerful men who condemn prostitutes but use their services. Written in 1893, the play was performed until 1902. In the meantime, Shaw began an extraordinary run of plays that wittily and unflinchingly dissected the fundamental assumptions of his time, including Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1895), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Man and Superman (1903), and Major Barbara (1905), among many others. Shaw wrote over fifty plays during his long and prolific life. By the time he wrote Pygmalion, his twenty-eighth, he was the leading British playwright of his time.

    Shaw’s private life remains a puzzle to his critics and biographers. Devoted to his mother, his relationships with other women were at best ambiguous. He lost his virginity at age 29, when he was seduced by a widow fifteen years his senior, but he remained seemingly uninterested in sex. Though he married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Irish heiress, in 1898, their marriage was celibate. Over the years he carried on several intense platonic infatuations including those with the famous actresses Ellen Terry and Stella Campbell.

    World War I started a few months after the opening of Pygmalion, and Shaw, a pacifist, devoted much of his energy to antiwar activities. His first major play after the war, Heartbreak House (1920), was highly critical of the generation that had led Britain into war. In 1920, inspired by the sainthood of Joan of Arc, he wrote Saint Joan (1923), which he considered his best play. He continued to write plays and deliver opinionated talks and screeds until his death. In 1928 he published The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, and in 1949, he published a puppet play, Shakes versus Shav, a humorous competition between himself and William Shakespeare. After the death of his wife in 1943, he moved to his country home at Ayot St. Lawrence, where he died at the age of 94 on November 2, 1950, after a fall in his garden.

    Historical and Literary Context of Pygmalion

    The Pygamalion Myth and Modern Theater

    The Pygmalion story was well known to British audiences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It had been used in William Morris’s poem The Earthly Paradise (1868–1870) and the comedy Pygmalion and Galatea (1871) by W. S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan). There were also a number of contemporary melodramas about the transformation of working-class girls into ladies, particularly Dion Boucicault’s Grimaldi; or the Life of an Actress (first produced in London in 1862), about an old actor named Grimaldi who trains a Covent Garden flower girl to be an actress. These musical and melodramatic versions of the story were typical of late Victorian dramatic fare. Shaw’s version of the story, however, was deeply influenced by the new theater of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, the acknowledged father of modern drama, who rejected melodrama and sentimentality in favor of starkly realistic and often tragic stories of middle-class life. Shaw was a champion of Ibsen’s work during its long climb out of censorship and scandal, and claimed that seeing an Ibsen play was the thing that made him realize he was meant to write plays. Thus did Shaw’s Galatea become a modern working-class girl and his Pygmalion a snob who refuses to fall in love with the woman he claims to have created.

    High Society

    In Shaw’s contemporary early twentieth-century London setting, rigid class distinctions were still observed: although rich young men might be educated for the professions, many still believed themselves superior to those who earned their living in business or trade. Even in families such as the Eynsford-Hills in Pygmalion, whose inherited wealth had dwindled away, no one thought it necessary to train their children for gainful employment. Instead, they clung to privileges and activities they couldn’t really afford, such as attending concerts, the theater, and any at home afternoons or formal dinners to which they could get invited. Rich women like Mrs. Higgins dressed in elaborate, expensive clothing and favored an overabundance of household decoration. There was little freedom and ease in social relations, and the upper classes showed little or no interest in considering the economics of life or in facing unpleasant facts. It was against this snobbery and willful ignorance that Shaw directed his satire. He set out to prove that high society, with its arbitrary standards of conduct, could be fooled into thinking Eliza a duchess merely because of her speech and appearance.

    Language and Language Reform

    Pygmalion is, in no small part, informed by the debates of Shaw’s day regarding the uses and misuses of the English language. Eliza makes her living selling flowers on the street, largely, say Higgins and Shaw both, because of her Cockney accent. (A Cockney was originally someone from the East End of London, but over time the term has come to refer to any working-class resident of London.) Eliza is barred by her vulgar speech from securing a job in a flower shop, which would be a step up for her. In the Britain of 1912 her outburst in Act III—Not bloody likely!—was shockingly strong language, and certainly not acceptable in a fashionable Chelsea drawing room. For the first British audiences of the play, it was a jaw-dropper, one Shaw had to fight for with many arguments about dramatic impact and realism.

    Shaw also used Pygmalion to pursue his lifelong interest in phonetics and the reform of spelling. Convinced that the alphabet of twenty-six letters did not accurately represent all the sounds of the language, he devised a New Alphabet, in which each letter stood for only one sound. He never succeeded in persuading anyone to adopt his plan, but he continued to air his opinions on language reform regularly throughout his long career.

    The Working Class

    Pygmalion reflects Shaw’s interest as an activist in the welfare of the poor. By 1912, some of the worst exploitative practices of the Industrial Revolution were coming to a close and conditions for the working class had greatly improved, but they still had few advantages. Eliza’s slum lodgings, for example, have no heat or hot water. When we first meet her she has never had a complete bath, and has never worn anything to bed other than her underwear. Like many girls of her class and circumstance, she was sent out to earn her own living as soon as she completed her meager nine years of compulsory schooling.

    Indeed, although the play remains as witty and entertaining as ever, many of the conditions it describes have changed. World War I had a cataclysmic effect on British culture and the British class system. Partly as a result of the sacrifice of millions of working-class men and women during the war, changes in British life improved the opportunities of the poor. After years of struggle (supported by Shaw, among many others), British women over thirty won the right to vote in 1918, the last year of the war. Ten years later the vote was extended to women over twenty-one. And the new Labour Party (which Shaw helped found in 1900) gave the working class a powerful political voice. Class distinctions remain important in Britain, but these days, a twenty-first-century woman of Eliza’s drive and intelligence has fewer obstacles to her success, no matter what her background is. She might still accept the help of a Henry Higgins, and be grateful to him for it, but would a modern Eliza put up with his bullying and condescension and petulance? Not bloody likely.

    CHRONOLOGY OF GEORGE BERNARD

    SHAW’S LIFE AND WORK

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