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  • Shaw, Crusading Journalist
  • David Clare (bio)
Bernard Shaw, W.T. Stead, and the New Journalism: Whitechapel, Parnell, Titanic, and the Great War. By Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 248 pages. £67.

Before he became a great and popular playwright, Bernard Shaw first found significant fame as an informed, perceptive, passionate, and often humorous theater, music, and art critic. However, while writing these early reviews, he was also producing journalistic works of a rather different stripe: crusading letters and articles that sought to create a more just and equal society. As Bernard Shaw, W.T. Stead, and the New Journalism, a new book by Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel, demonstrates, these early pieces were inspired by the emergence of the New Journalism, as promoted by English newspapermen like Stead. Of course, Shaw was always a dedicated fact-facer and truth-teller, so, while he admired the social justice instincts which inspired much New Journalism, he also resisted the movement's frequent recourse to titillating sensationalism and even (in the name of boosting one's cause) deliberate deception and the distorting of facts. Indeed, as O'Ceallaigh Ritschel amply proves, the New Journalism's influence on Shaw was always twofold: confirming his belief (or hope) that journalism could change the world for the better but also warning him to avoid dishonest claims or dwelling on salacious content in the hopes of attracting readers and (temporarily) carrying a point.

As O'Ceallaigh Ritschel notes, early in Shaw's career, his name did not carry enough weight to guarantee the publication of his crusading pieces. For example, in 1889, he wrote a brilliant letter to the editors of the Star in which he took English society to task for consistently declaring that homosexuality is "unnatural" and acting with mock horror over it when all were perfectly aware that gay sex went on regularly in English public schools and the Navy (among many other places) and was practiced by revered Greek philosophers. The Star rejected the letter, as did the editors of Truth, when Shaw subsequently sent it to them.

Of course, as Shaw's fame—first as a critic and then as a playwright—grew, he had less and less trouble getting his views into print. For example, during the early decades of the twentieth century, he wrote powerful pieces for the Irish Times and other Irish periodicals about the excessive use of corporal punishment in Irish homes and schools and the dangers of narrowly defined notions of Irish identity. These perceptive and prophetic pieces make chilling reading for those familiar with the widespread abuse that took place in Irish industrial schools and Magdalene laundries after Irish [End Page 353] independence or the role that rigid definitions of national identity played in perpetuating and exacerbating the Troubles in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s through the late 1990s.

Shaw, of course, also wrote on lighter public matters. A noteworthy example is his explanation of the work he did for a committee in 1934 in determining which pronunciations of words should be preferred by BBC announcers. The committee had been convened to ensure that the discussion of a topic would not be obscured because a key word was being pronounced in a way only familiar to people in one small part of the United Kingdom. In Shaw's published comments on the committee's controversial work, he interestingly disagrees with the BBC's preference that all announcers use the haughty-sounding "Oxford accent"—mainly familiar to us today from World War II–era newsreels and films. Shaw believed that announcers should simply use their own regional accents, while making sure to employ the most widely understood pronunciation of contentious words. In defending this point, Shaw comically argues, "In choosing an announcer regard must be paid to the psychological effect of his accent. An Oxford accent is considered by many graduates of that University to be the perfection of correct English; but unfortunately over large and densely populated districts of Great Britain it irritates some listeners to the point of switching off, and infuriates others so much that they smash their wireless sets because they cannot smash the Oxonian."1

Given the broad range...

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