Widowers' Houses & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

GBS

52/ Bernard Shaw’s diary entry for 8th March 1893

Israel in Egypt [by George Frideric Handel] at the Albert Hall. Royal Choral Society.

Corrected proofs of Widowers’ Houses. As it was a very fine day I went off to FE [Florence Emery née Farr], who got some purchase and came off with me to Kew and then on the water to Richmond. We called for [C. Duncan] Lewis but he was out. We had a meal at Ferrari’s and then took a walk in the park. Then back to killing Rd. I came back by the 22.37 train

53/ Bernard Shaw’s diary entry for 12th March 1893

SUNDAY Lecture on “The Evolution of Socialism” at the Tottenham Radical Club (H. Bond Holding, 7 Lynwood Villas, Wood Green N.). Train Liverpool St to Bruce Grove. 19.25; return 21.57.

[Went to] Tottenham. Finished and sent off appendix to Widowers’ Houses—last of the copy. Wrote notes for World on Spitzer catalogue and, finished World article. Went to the Grosvenor with [Hubert] Morgan-Browne in the evening.

54/ Bernard Shaw’s diary entry for 21st March 1893

Fabian Publishing Committee. 276 Strand. 17. Sub-Committee Joint Socialist, at Morris’s, at 20. Trinity College. Mandeville Place. Students’ Chamber Concert and Conversazione. 20 to 23.

Slept by snatches, disturbed by the hammering of the workmen at the drains, until past 11; so that I was abominably late. Again read over the preface to Widowers’ Houses—fortunately, as I found one or two stupid oversights in it. After dinner called for [William] Archer, but he was in the country. I then, having an hour to kill before the Publishing Committee, called on the Carrs’ [Herbert Wildon Carr and Geraldine Carr née Spooner] found Geraldine there. She has taken to painting at the Slade School. Carr came in afterwards. After the Committee I went out to Hammersmith with [May] Sparling and had “tea” at the Terrace. Before dinner I had to go to Bloomsbury to the lavatory there, as the one at Portland Rd. was out of order.

Lavatory, Bloomsbury 1d Papers 1d Dinner 1/1 Train Temple to Rav[enscour]t Pk 6d Hammer-

smith to Portland Rd 6d

55/ Bernard Shaw’s diary entry for 22nd March 1893

Mrs Morgan-Brown’s At-Home. 46 Ridgmount Gardens. 16-19. Boat Race. 15. Sparlings’ [Henry Halliday Sparling and Mrs Sparling née May Morris]. Meet [Joseph Francis] Oakeshott at the Wheatsheaf at 14 and walk out together. Ridley Art Club; see Saturday last.

Drafted advert of Independent Theatre for Widowers’ Houses. Played through some of Verdi’s Falstaff. The Salts [Henry Stephens Salt and Mrs Salt née Catherine (Kate) Joynes] were at the Wheatsheaf; and Mrs Salt walked with me to the Circus, Salt coming behind with Oakeshott. They left us at the Circus. Oakeshott and I walked out to Hammersmith. We met Bertha and Mabel Newcombe on the way and put them into a cab. After the Race I went into Walkers’ [Emery Walker and his wife Mary Grace Walker née Jones] for a while. Then I returned to Sparlings’, where there were still a good many people. Eventually all left except the Steffens [Gustav Steffen and Anna Oscara Steffen née von Sydow] and Miss [Isobel E.] Priestley, who made an elaborate examination of my hand and described my character. We did some playing later in the evening. I came back with Miss Priestley by the 23.5 train, and saw her home to Woburn Place.

Papers 1d Lavatory ld Dinner 1/3 Tip to cab tout 6d Train Ravenscourt Park to Gower St 9d

56/ Bernard Shaw’s diary entry for 23rd March 1893

Last day for nominations for Fabian Executive. Philharmonic Concert. St. James’s Hall. 20. Fabian Publishing Committee. 276 Strand. 17. Meet Miss Leeds (Miss Priestley’s friend) at the Fabian office at 16.45.

Began World article. Returned here after dinner to change my clothes and wash. After the Committee [Sydney] Olivier came with me to the Orange Grove. I left the concert at the end of the first part. When I got home I read the last proofs of Widowers’ Houses and sent them off. Also began reading Archer’s article “The Mausoleum of Ibsen” in proof and MS.

Lavatory 1d Hair cut &c 1/– Papers 1d Dinner 3d “Tea” at Orange Grove 1/6

57/ To William Archer

24th March 1893

I leave the article [The Mausoleum of Ibsen], which seems to me good enough in spite of its inhumanity, except on one point. The explanation of the success of the translations on the stage is that in middle class social and political life Norway is the microcosm and England is the macrocosm. As I have often told you, if you would only join the local caucus, you would see at once that An Enemy of the People [by Henrik Johan Ibsen] comes home to Holborn as closely as A Doll’s House [by Henrik Johan Ibsen] comes home to Brixton and Holloway, which are just as narrow and provincial as Norway. Ninetyfive per cent of an Ibsen play is as true of any English town as it is of Christiania; and the odd five per cent is not sufficient to make the performance in the least puzzling. Probably this is less true of France; but modern commercialism levels all nations down to the same bourgeois life, and raises the same problems for realist playwrights, though not for romantic ones. This is what destroys the whole parallel between [Jean-Baptiste Poquelin alias] Molière and Co. (as far as translation is concerned) and Ibsen; and I think you owe it to your reputation to shew that the difference is within the sphere of your consciousness in the article. Even apart from realist plays the drama is more international than you represent it; for most of the adaptations—especially the most successful ones—are very close translations. It is the ultraadapted ones that fail.

The note about the theatres on page 76 of the MS had better come out, because the description of the Novelty [Theatre] is, I think distinctly libellous, and the other two instances are more of the nature of apologies.

The tone of the article generally is one of devilish malignity towards the unfortunate [critic Clement] Scott and the rest. They may deserve it; but when Widowers’ Houses celebrates its six hundredth night, Scott will have his revenge.

I leave you the two sheets of W. H. [Widowers’ Houses] which were missing from the set of proofs I sent you before. There are two points to admire: first, the ingenuity with which I have secured a preface by William Archer without running any of the risks which destroyed poor [Henry Arthur] Jones; and second, the sublime preface by [Jacob Thomas] Grein, with its adroit allusion to the play ‘setting the machinery of public opinion in motion and SUPPLYING BRICKS’ &c. The proof of the final sheet is unique, and will be readily saleable for ten guineas in view of the champion misprint which has produced the sentence beginning on the last line of page 121.

I make no apology for lifting your copy out of the World, as I confined myself strictly to that part which is clearly made out of my own flesh and blood.

Please let me know whether you are going to publish [a translation from the Danish of the play written by Edvard Brandes] A Visit in the series (or anything else) as I see I shall have to do the whole volume, advertisements and all, myself.

GBS

58/ Bernard Shaw’s diary entry for 27th March 1893

Fabian Central Group. 32 Great Ormond St. Mary Belcher on “Socialism and Sanitation.” 20. Tea at Archer’s. 18. Liberal and Radical Union Council meeting. National Liberal Club. 20.

Wrote some letters and sent off the last revises of Widowers’ Houses marked “press.” Also finished and sent the advertisement sheets to Henry and Co. By that time it was nearly four o’clock. I dined at the café opposite Portland Rd. station and went to see FE [Florence Emery]; but she was out. I walked back to Queens Rd. Bayswater and took bus to Holborn. Had tea alone with Archer who walked with me as far as Waterloo Place on my way to the National Liberal Club. I did not speak there, except to ask a question. Wrote a few letters.

Dinner at Menegallo’s 2/— Papers 1d Lavatory 1d Train to Shepherds Bush & back 9d Bus Queen’s

Rd to Oxford O 2d Oxford St to Holborn 1d

59/ To William Archer

27th March 1893

I am writing to [Jacob Thomas “Jack”] Grein to alter the advertisement of the 2nd vol. of the I.T. series [Independent Theatre book series of plays] on the ground that you are resolved not to have any other play in the same book with ‘A Visit.’ I suppose that is all right. I am also writing to [George] Moore asking him whether he is still bent on taking ‘The Strike’ [The Strike at Arlingford] to Scott [The Walter Scott Publishing Co Ltd.]

About that first act, I am prepared to admit that it is no great shakes, except that Cokane is a creation, and my one French critic was right when he said that ‘la composition de cette lettre à laquelle Sartorius est appelé à collaborer pendant que les deux amoureux s’en vont reflirter dans le fond du jardin, constitue une scène de réelle et bonne comédie, au dialogue piquant et serré.’ Your objection to both is bad taste pure and simple; but as for the rest I do not press its excellence, provided you allow for the inevitable postponement of the glimpse of the under world to the second act caused by your own insistence on my beginning on the Rhine. ‘Tu l’as voulu, George Dandin.’

GBS

60/ Bernard Shaw’s diary entry for 5th April 1893

Did not feel inclined to work hard; so did some pasting into scrap book; to begin; and then drafted a circular letter to be sent by Henry and Co., about Widowers’ Houses to several press correspondents, of whom I made a list of 50. Then walked to the Strand to buy a Fortnightly Review. Then off, to FE [Florence Emery]. We took a walk and discovered Perivale Church [Perivale St. Andrews would be the name of Undershaft’s factory town in Major Barbara] and heard an extra-ordinary performance by a nightingale close to Ealing on our way back..; Wrote to Henry and Co. a second time when I got back in reply to their objection to mention other publishers in their advertisements of my other works in Widowers’ Houses.

Fortnightly Review 2/— Dinner at Orange Grove 1/3 Train Ch[arin]g + to Ravenscourt Pk 6d Ravenscourt Pk to Ealing Common (2) 1/4 Westiminsted Gaziettel 1d Almonds3d , Ealing to Ealing Common (2) 4d Shepherds Bush to Portland Rd 6d

61/ Bernard Shaw’s diary entry for 20th May 1893

Wrote several letters, notably one to [James] Welch about his proposals to get Widowers’ Houses played at the East End. Corrected proof of World article. Then went out to Ealing and spent the rest of the day with the Beattys [Pakenham Thomas Beatty and his wife Edith ‘Ida’ Beatty]. Came back by the 22.20 train, getting out at Gloucester Rd. and walking home across the Park.

Papers 1d Dinner at Orange Grove 1/3 Train Charing + to Ealing (return) 1/2

62/ Bernard Shaw’s diary entry for 21st May 1893

Wrote some letters, especially one to [Arthur Bingham] Walkley about his Star notice of Widowers’ Houses. Then rushed off to Hammersmith, not getting there until past 14. May [Mrs Sparling née Morris] was at the Terrace alone, [Henry Halliday] Sparling being in France. Spooner [possibly a relative of Geraldine Carr née Spooner] called in the afternoon whilst we were sitting out in the garden. He stayed until after 17, when May and I walked to Richmond by way of Strand on the Green, Kew Gardens and the towpath. We came back by train and I played Die Walküre [by Richard Wagner] to her after tea. I slept at the Terrace.

Train to Hammersmith (return not used) 10d Richmond to Ravenscourt Pk (2) 1/2

63/ Bernard Shaw’s article “The Author to the Dramatic Critics” printed as an appendix to the Independent Theatre’s publication of Widowers’ Houses

May 1893

Fellow critics

It is one of my advantages that I can discuss criticism, not merely as an author, but as a critic. I have no illusions about critics being authors who have failed. I know, as one who has practised both crafts, that authorship is child’s play compared to criticism; and I have, you may depend upon it, my full share of the professional instinct which regards the romancer as a mere adventurer in literature, and the critic as a highly skilled workman. Ask any novelist or dramatist whether he can write a better novel or play than I; and he will blithely say Yes. Ask him to take my place as critic for one week; and he will blench from the test. The truth is that the critic stands between popular authorship, for which he is not silly enough, and great authorship, for which he has not genius enough. It is certainly true that the status of popular author is much coveted by critics; but that is because the popular author is much better paid for much easier work. [William Makepeace] Thackeray, like many other eminent authors, coveted a government sinecure; but nobody therefore supposes that authors are merely unsuccessful sinecurists, or that a well paid post in the civil service would have been intellectually a promotion for Thackeray. He who publishes a critical essay well knows how few care to read such things; whereas some donkey of an author, with the imagination of a schoolboy, or some sentimental young lady perhaps, will turn out a story too absurd to be thinkable by an ordinarily competent critic, and yet have it bought by scores and hundreds of thousands of readers of fiction. It is the natural desire to wallow in the profits of romantic makebelieve instead of toiling for the scanty wages of “the intolerable fatigue of thought” that drives the critic to envy the author.

You will now feel, fellow critics, that in turning dramatist I have not turned traitor. It is for the honor of our guild that I venture to suggest that even in the intellectual department the authors are getting ahead of us. I do not wish to rake up the case of [Henrik Johan] Ibsen and his Ghosts again: I think it will be admited now that the most oldfashioned school for young ladies in the country would have made almost as good a job of that discussion as we did. It was not a question of our liking Ibsen or not liking him, agreeing with him or not agreeing with him. Whichever way our bias lay it was our business to analyse his position skilfully and pronounce on it coolly. Under no circumstances should we have forgotten ourselves so far as to scold at him and cry Fie! like a bevy of illiterate prudes. This, however, is what too many of us did; and now, since what is done cannot be undone, we had better put up a few posts to warn future critics off the dangerous places where we come to grief oftenest.

The first warning I propose is: Do not let us raise the cry of “Ibsen” whenever we find a modern idea in a play. See what it has led to in the following passages culled from criticisms—some of them friendly and able ones—of Widowers’ Houses.

“As an ardent admirer of Ibsen’s methods, he has not scrupled to follow the method of that writer to extremes.” Daily Telegraph.

“The lesson is trite in the case of creeds that the disciple not seldom distances the master. Ibsen has justly been charged,” &c., &c. The Athenæum.

“The London Ibsen. One can see that all this is meant to be exceedingly Ibsenesque.” Sunday Sun.

“I really think it is time the Independent Theatre Society made an effort to secure a play that is not moulded on the lines laid down by the great and only Ibsen.” Pelican.

“Mr Shaw is a zealous Ibsenite.” Weekly Dispatch.

“A rather silly play by a rather clever man, which may be either worship or satire of Ibsenius the Great.” Saturday Review.

“Mr Shaw is the high priest, one may say, of Ibsenism.” Piccadilly.

“Like all the Ibsenians he ruins his argument,” &c. Modern Society.

“Mr Shaw is an Ibsenite and is consequently quite up to date.” Freeman’s Journal.

“A promising young tigress of a daughter, who is drawn on the severest principles of Ibsenite heredity.” Western Mercury.

Now the first two acts of Widowers’ Houses were written in 1885, when I knew nothing about Ibsen; and I must add that the authors of the lines quoted above should have guessed this, because there is not one idea in the play that cannot be more easily referred to half a dozen English writers than to Ibsen; whilst of his peculiar retrospective method, by which his plays are made to turn upon events supposed to have happened before the rise of the curtain, there is not a try in my work. The subjects which seem most strongly to suggest Ibsen to modern critics are (1) Heredity, (2) the Emancipation of Woman, (3) any adverse criticism whatever of our marriage laws and customs, and (4) any mixture of wickedness and goodness in the same character. It is therefore necessary to remind ourselves that modern English culture was saturated with the conception of heredity by Herbert Spencer, [Charles] Darwin, [Thomas Henry] Huxley, [John] Tyndall, and [Francis] Galton before Ibsen’s name was known here; that the Married Women’s Property Act, the result of a long and strenuous crusade against what I may call the anti-Ibsenite ideal of marriage, was passed in England before [Ibsen’s] A Doll’s House was written; that the two most famous works on the subject of Women’s Rights are Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication and John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women, dated respectively 1792 and 1869; and that those who may never have studied the complex characters in the fiction of [Honoré de] Balzac, George Eliot, George Meredith, and other well known modern writers, may at least be presumed to have read the history of King David in the Bible, and to have learnt from it that Nature does not keep heroism exclusively for one set of men and villainy exclusively for another, merely to enable us all to become dramatists and “paint character” with a bucket of whitewash and a jar of lampblack. These things are the more important for a critic to observe, because matters have taken such a course in England for the last fifty years that the man who has neither the culture of the Bible nor that of the Evolutionist school is in ninetynine cases out of a hundred a man with no culture at all: a suspicion not to be lightly incurred by anyone whose calling it is to bring culture to bear on dramatic literature. Be warned therefore; for it is hard to see how a critic who has dipped into modern English literature even to the modest extent of reading one of Mr Grant Allen’s novels, could write as if every idea in physics and morals that is not to be found in [Robert] Chambers’ Vestiges of Creation and Dr [Isaac] Watts’ poems must necessarily be a recent Norwegian importation.

The second warning is: Let us not try to encourage the hypocrisy of the theatre, already greater than that of the conventicle, by being more austere in our judgment of dramatis personæ than of real men and women. Imitate that excellent critic of mine (known to me only through his very agreeable notice of my play), the London correspondent of The Glasgow Herald, who says: “The characters are depicted naturally, and not in the glorified form so common upon the conventional stage. . . It was a treat for once to see a hero (like one of Thackeray’s) no better than one of his fellow men; to listen to the worldliness of the slum landlord and his clerk; and particularly to welcome a heroine who shews her temper to her betrothed, and still more to her father, and who, like other estimable womankind whom we frequently meet in real life, though rarely on the stage, is always ready to quarrel on a point of feminine dignity, but when ‘cornered’ is always anxious to forgive and to make friends again.”

That is what I call a reasonable criticism.

Now listen to some of the others:

“There can hardly be said to be a single estimable personage in the whole play.” Times.

“All his dramatis persona are entirely selfish and despicable.” Daily Telegraph.

“Revolting picture of middleclass life. . . Remorselessly the eccentric one [the author] laid bare his idealized essence of snobbishness compressed from all the worst specimens of his fellowmen, and bade us believe that he was painting from life. . . The abominable Blanche appears in a worse light than ever; and the eccentricity ends with the smothering of what small spark of decency remained in the heart of the only person of the whole bunch who ever had any.” Morning Leader.

“It is already impossible, we should hope, to find a set of people so peculiar and unsympathetic as those introduced in this play.” Morning Advertiser.

“In such a world what is to be done but to shew hands all round and caper to the tune of ‘rogues all’?” Globe.

“Mr [William Schwenck] Gilbert possesses an uncanny habit of turning up the seamy side of life’s robe; but Mr Shaw’s world has not rags enough to cover its nudity. He aims to shew with Zolaesque exactitude that middleclass life is foul and leprous. The play means that the middle class, even to its womanhood, is brutal at heart, or it means nothing.” The Athenæum.

“A set of bloodsuckers. Everyone is ill conditioned, quarrelsome, fractious, apt to behave, at a moment’s notice, like a badly brought-up child.” World.

“The mere word ‘mortgage’ suffices to turn hero into rascal. Mr Shaw will say that is his point: scratch a middleclass hero and you find a rascal.” Speaker.

“Revelation of a distorted and myopic outlook on society.” Sunday Sun.

“Very disagreeable heroine. . . all the other characters in the play—the poor parlormaid alone excepted—are as hateful as that heroine.” Era.

“Mr Shaw devotes all his energies to making his characters unsympathetic, sordid, soulless: ending even worse than they began.” Stage.

“Heartless young lady. . . cads of diverse temperaments.” Weekly Dispatch.

“He goes further than Ibsen, whose characters are a mixture of knaves and fools; whereas in Widowers’ Houses they are all knaves.” Modern Society.

“Mr Shaw starts with a total disbelief in human nature.” Freeman’s Journal.

“All the characters were villains except a pretty parlormaid.” Western Mercury.

“The moral seems to be the utter selfishness of human nature outside a progressive County Council.” Umpire.

“I could not help noticing that the only thoroughly decent character in the play was a sort of Mrs Harris [a character who never appears in a novel by Charles Dickens The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit] in the shape of the parson, who was only allowed to be talked about, but who did not appear.” Mr Ben Greet, addressing the Church and Stage Guild.

I remember once hearing Mr [Dwight Lyman] Moody’s Evangelist preach on the text “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” He declared strenuously that in morals a miss is as good as a mile, and that the most venial sin damns as effectually as the most atrocious crime. To have fallen short of the glory of God is enough, whether by an inch or a league does not matter. I must say that from any other point of view than Mr Moody’s, the passages set forth above appear to me to be ludicrous exaggerations. Even after making all allowance for the effect on the writers of the way in which, for the first time on the stage (as far as I know) they saw the citizen with his share in the guilt of our industrial system brought home to him, I still think that they might have paused to ask themselves in what respect Trench, Sartorius, Blanche, Cokane, and Lickcheese are any worse, I will not say than themselves, but than the characters in any of the comedies, ancient or modern, to which they have taken no exception on this score. I certainly had no intention of spoiling the moral of my play by making the characters at all singular; and I suggest that the following considerations will explain my apparent cynicism.

Formerly, a man was responsible only for his private conduct and for the maintenance of his own household. Today, as an inevitable consequence of Democracy, he is responsible for the state of the whole community which he helps to govern as a citizen and a voter. Now a man may discharge his private responsibility very well, and yet not even realize that his public responsibility exists. Just as Charles [Dickens] I was an excellent private gentleman and an intolerable king, so most men today are reasonably good friends and fathers, but execrable citizens. Sartorius is the ordinary man of business, voting for the candidate who promises to keep down the rates, and getting on the vestry solely to prevent the vestry from interfering with his property. And he does so in a hypocritical way only because that is the custom: not in the least because he is a Pecksniff. [Seth Pecksniff is a character in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens.] I have drawn him as a man of strong and masterful character, unscrupulous but not a lawbreaker, a kind and unselfish father, and much more reasonable and even magnanimous with Trench than the typical villa owner, who is a comparatively spiteful and huffy person. He is, in short, distinctly an exceptional and superior specimen of the middleclass man whose business it is to deal directly with the poor. His rascality—for from the social point of view he certainly is a callous rascal—does not lie in his refusing to spend money on his rookeries, since his plea that his tenants would burn his improvements is perfectly well founded. It lies altogether in his indifference to defects in our social system which produce a class of persons so poor that they are driven by constant physical privation to turn everything they can lay hands on into more fuel and more food. When we find a castaway at sea chewing his boots to appease his hunger, we do not stigmatize him as a creature too degraded to appreciate the right use of boots: we take him aboard and relieve his hunger, after which he wears his boots as appreciatively as a West End gentleman. But Sartorius is not ashamed to explain the disappearance of his banisters and cistern lids on the absurd ground that “these people do not know how to live in handsome houses.” He has found out that there is no use in treating them goodnaturedly; and he has not enough social conscience to proceed to ask why there is no use, and to find out how, as a citizen and an elector, to remedy the abject poverty which makes a woman willing, for the sake of having a good warm, to burn the handrail that is put up to save her and her neighbors from falling downstairs. The point may not be obvious at once to a critic who has only to ring the bell for another scuttle of Wallsend [Wallsend is a town in the North East England which was famous for coal mining.] when his fire runs low, any more than it was obvious to Sartorius. Consequently, in every denunciation of Sartorius as a monster, we may see the hand of Sartorius himself.

I now come to a string of remonstrances partly brought on me by a passage in an interview published in the Star newspaper (November 29th, 1892), in which I declared that I wished to appeal to the audience “on the solid ground of political economy,” and to have a blackboard on the stage with diagrams to illustrate my points, with much more chaff of the same kind.

Here is the result:

“A kind of leading article of the slashing type.” Morning.

“An exposition in dialogue of the New Economics. . . What has this farrago of newspaper leaders and Fabian essays to do with the play?” Star.

“Undramatic attempt to cut up a Parliamentary Report into uneven stage lengths. . . Published as one of the dialogues sometimes given in The Fortnightly Review it would be effective.” Echo.

“A discussion, with open doors, of the pros and cons of slum landlordism. . . a good sermon.” Black and White.

“A new form of didactic Socialistic demonstration, like the practicable laundries with the poor washerwomen at work which figured in a recent procession in Hyde Park.” Sunday Sun.

“It would be readable and might be useful as a Fabian pamphlet.” Weekly Dispatch.

“In no sense a drama, but a succession of dialogues in which the author sets forth his views concerning Socialist questions.” Lloyds.

“Not a play: a pamphlet.” Encore.

“The exposure of certain social sins connected with the letting of tenement houses afforded the sole raison d’être of Mr Shaw’s feeble little play.” Observer.

“His propaganda: I beg pardon, his new play.” Penny Illustrated Paper.

“Merely a lecture.” Financial Observer.

“Mr Shaw wishes to utter a tirade against certain abuses; and he thinks the theatre a suitable pulpit for his utterances.” Colonies and India.

“The play is a pamphlet in dramatic form.” Western Mercury.

“The whole of the three acts is occupied with a dreary discussion of the ethics of slum property.” Birmingham Post.

“Three acts of dreary dissertation on the familiar text that ‘rent is robbery.’ ” Yorkshire Post.

“Mr Bernard Shaw is an amiable Fabian who believes that ‘rent is robbery.’ ” Yorkshire Evening Post.

Now I think it must be evident at this rate to all who have read the play, that if I had written The Merchant of Venice [a play written by William Shakespeare in which a merchant in Venice named Antonio defaults on a large loan provided by a Jewish moneylender Shylock] it would have been denounced as a dissertation on the Jewish question, complicated by a crude exposition of the peculiar views of the Fabian Society on the law of contract. All I need say on the Fabian point is that any person who would like to see the difference between an essay on rent and Widowers’ Houses can buy Fabian Essays, containing just such an essay by me, for ninepence. Fabian pamphlets, in which I have had a hand, can be obtained for a penny; and a comparison of them with this play will shew how little the critics quoted above know how merciful I have been to them. Let me say, however, that it is impossible for any fictionist, dramatic or other, to make true pictures of modern society without some knowledge of the economic anatomy of it. And since what the dramatist ought to know the critic ought to know, a course of Fabian literature would most unquestionably do incalculable good to both dramatists and critics, if they could be persuaded to go through it. For all that, I see that it would be useless to blame a critic today for not being an economist, or even an ordinarily competent politician and man of business. Nobody expects it from him; and he himself benightedly ridicules the idea. But what I do expect him to know is that “bluebook plays” hold the stage far better than conventionally idealist dramas. I need only mention the irrepressible It Is Never Too Late to Mend [by Charles Reade] to prove that Widowers’ Houses, far from being a play of so new a sort that its very title to the name of drama is questionable, is, on its bluebook side, a sample (whether good or bad is not here in question) of one of the most familiar, popular, and firmly established genres in English dramatic literature. It is a matter of experience that the dramatized or novelized bluebook or Fabian Essay (so to speak) has ten times as much chance of success as the mere romance, though it is also, of course, a much more difficult job for the writer. My warning therefore is against the folly of assuming that the reverse is the case, and that a play is handicapped by a basis of bluebook. A wary critic, if he wished to “slate” Widowers’ Houses, would begin somewhat in this fashion: “Not even with all the advantages of his profound economic knowledge and his complete acquaintance with the wealth of dramatic material stored in our national bluebook literature was Mr Shaw able to produce a tolerable play.” It is mere perversity to assume that the less a dramatist knows and cares about real life, the better his plays are likely to be.