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SHAW The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 26 (2006) 226-229


An Inestimable Debt
Reviewed by
Michel W. Pharand
The British Library Catalogue of George Bernard Shaw Papers. Edited by Anne Summers. London: British Library, 2005. xvii + 321 pp. Index. £50.00.

"It became his club, his university, a refuge, and the center of his life for almost a decade"—Michael Holroyd's description of the British Museum, whose Reading Room served as Shaw's surrogate home for most of the 1880s, reminds us of the crucial role the institution played in Shaw's self-education. And what Shaw took from the library by way of facts and ideas, knowledge and insights, has now been returned to us a hundredfold by way of this handsome, practical, user-friendly volume.

Although some of the information in this hardcopy Catalogue can be found in the Manuscripts Online Catalogue, this volume "has made it possible to edit and structure some 4,000 index entries . . . under additional headings." Dr. C. J. Wright, Head of Manuscripts, acknowledges in his foreword the "many pairs of curatorial hands," including editor Anne Summers (assisted by William Frame), involved in sorting and cataloging the massive holdings acquired over a period of seven decades, as well as "the scholarly help and encouragement of Dan H. Laurence and Michael Holroyd." What is amazing is that such a detailed record of these holdings is able to fit into a single book with normal-sized print font and intelligent cross-indexing.

The uncredited introduction (presumably by Summers) provides an excellent overview of the background to the British Library's acquisitions of Shaw materials. The "Descriptive Lists" section supplements (and precedes) the index with information about the provenance of manuscripts, subsequent rearrangement (if any), and intellectual (literary, social, political) context. Notable additions have included the papers of T. J. Wise (1938), Charlotte Shaw (1971), and G. K. Chesterton (1990); the collection at Ayot St. Lawrence (1982); and two important sources of Shaw manuscripts: the "Lord Chamberlain's Plays" and "Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence," containing "many Shaw scripts, often annotated either by the playwright's or the Censor's pen," in particular Mrs Warren's Profession,The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, and Geneva.

The alphabetized index, which forms the bulk of the volume (pp. 81–321), is a model of concision, each entry containing enough information to fully contextualize each document or individual. Aside from the larger collections of correspondence—William Archer, Max Beerbohm, G. K. Chesterton, Alfred Douglas, Harley Granville-Barker, Frank Harris, T. E. Lawrence, William Morris, Gilbert Murray, Auguste Rodin, Henry Salt, Ellen Terry, and H. G. Wells (to name only a few)—we find letters from publishers, booksellers, translators, authors, journalists, socialists, suffragists, theater managers, actors and actresses, spelling reformers, anti-vaccinationists, and anti-vivisectionists. [End Page 226]

Everyone, it seems, wrote to Shaw: from Henry Light, captain of the Vegetarian Cycling Club, to the Begum Atiya of Aiwane Raf'at of Bombay. There are letters from ministers, journalists, engineers, architects, physicians, barristers and solicitors, schoolchildren, photographers, artists, musicians, economists, inventors, members of Parliament, a woolen merchant, a draper, a tobacconist, a private detective, a mechanic, a railway clerk, a metallurgist, a copper smelter, a chiropodist, two osteopaths, two dentists, two hairdressers, three eugenicists, a professor of theoretical astronomy, a pipe organ builder, an inmate of California's San Quentin Prison, and one Arthur Hinton, "former criminal."

The documents in the British Library collections are as varied as one would expect from a man whose interests were myriad and whose life spanned the Victorian Age to the Atomic Age. There is a copy of Shaw's 1902 "phrenological assessment," his horoscope (ca. 1914), and his 1928 "Naprapathic Chart Book"; a 1928 letter from chirognomist Noel Jacquin and a 1930 palm reading; Shaw's 1947 certificate of membership in the British Interplanetary Society—yes, at ninety-one Shaw was interested in space exploration!—and a 1949 letter from Arthur Davies (of Santa Monica, California) asking Shaw if he believed in ghosts. (To find out if he did...

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