VIII. The Shaw Business Papers

[Some Principal Shaw Research Sources]

A substantial bequest to the Fabian Society gave Sidney Webb the opportunity to realize a cherished purpose: the foundation, in two back rooms in John Street in 1895, of a London School of Economics (LSE). Bernard Shaw, recruited to this cause, worked skillfully and energetically to bring round the other leading Fabians. He had to persuade them that this was no diversion of funds intended for propaganda purposes, and that there was no contradiction between the two main functions of the proposed institution: disinterested research and instrumentality in the Socialist reform of society. Until the end of the second world war the LSE continued to be regarded as a largely “red” foundation. In subsequent years, when Labor was the party of government in Britain, it became associated with what was then popularly known as “the Establishment” and remained so when Labor gave way to Tory and Tory to New Labor. Today it is no more nor less left-wing than the rest of the higher education sector in Britain.

Beatrice Webb had been cultivating the interest of Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend in the project. From this source came £1,000 towards the Library, a substantial contribution (later repeated), and endowment of a scholarship reserved for women. The lady also undertook, in 1896, to share the expense of providing premises for the School at 10 Adelphi Terrace by making her home on the upper floors and paying the LSE generously for the privilege. If the Webb plans had been fully realized, she would have married Graham Wallas, who would have accepted appointment as Director of the School. Instead, Shaw secured the “green-eyed millionairess” for himself; and so it came about that it was he who spent the early years of his married life living “over the shop,” where, his diaries record, he attended lectures by Bertrand Russell in 1896. After the LSE took up occupation of its present-day site in Clare Market in May 1902, Shaw maintained the connection, in turn addressing the Students’ Union on “Life, Literature, and Political Economy” on 13 December 1905 and on “The Case for Equality” on 12 February 1913.

So it is not surprising that, in the fullness of time, Shaw left his business papers and, on less immediately obvious grounds, his old personal and engagement diaries to the LSE Library, now the British Library of Political and Economic Science (BLPES). He envisaged the use of the collection by “economic or legal historians or by biographers seeking documentary evidence as to prices and practices during the period covered by my lifetime.” This hardly suggests the wide range and miscellaneous nature of the collection, or its value both as an historical model of business management (the business being communication) and as an illumination of Shaw’s complex personality.

The bulk of the bequest is now contained in twenty-nine boxed sections, preserving the original, roughly classified arrangement. The numbering of the sections defies chronology: Box 1 includes documents relating to United Kingdom productions, professional and amateur, of Shaw’s plays, starting in 1943, with a few items relating to earlier activities. A record of American stage performances, arranged alphabetically, runs from 1897 to 1930. For a comparable ledger relating to Britain, with a full chronological record of royalty payments, it is necessary to go to sections 28 and 29. In between are to be found, in no significant order, records of the author’s dealings with publishers, printers, binders, foreign agents, newspaper editors, translators, solicitors, and tax authorities in Britain and the U.S.A. There is correspondence over film and broadcasting rights and other evidence of Shaw’s recognition of the importance of the cinema.

Section 22 consists of family legal documents: terms of Shaw’s parents’ marriage settlement, as well as the settlement between Charlotte and himself; a partnership agreement signed by his father; terms of the settlement Shaw made on his mother and other family members; and real estate documents pertaining to property in Ireland and at Ayot St. Lawrence, where the Old Rectory became “Shaw’s Corner” and the householder involved himself in local environmental concerns. Domestic bills may be found in section 25, following a box that documents the history of Shaw’s motor cars.

In section 26 is a notebook (1937) listing the provisions of Shaw’s will drawn up in that year. It also contains notes, or a memorandum of contents, for A Cure for Political Ignorance. The fragments that follow, with sub-headings “The Delusions of Unanimity” and “Is Human Nature Incurably Depraved?” and with a reference to H. G. Wells’s “Declaration of Rights,” suggest preliminary work for Everybody’s Political What’s What? Section 26 consists of the little books classified as “engagement diaries,” beginning with the years 1877 and 1880 and ending with 1950. These have not been published, but are described in Stanley Weintraub’s edition (1986) of the personal diaries. A few early volumes seem to have turned up since then. There is an embargo on the photocopying of these diaries. The originals of the 1885–1897 personal diaries, together with Blanche Patch’s incomplete and imperfect transcripts of Shaw’s shorthand entries, form a separate collection (call-mark: SR 293).

Why Shaw chose to allot his diaries to the LSE becomes clear when we find him using them to record daily expenditures in his penurious youth and the receipt of fees/royalty payments in later years. Shaw, preferring to communicate with others than himself, was not one of Nature’s diarists, and there were many pages he could put to the uses of petty accounting. But this is only part of the contents, and there are certainly details of biographical information to be gleaned from these volumes.

An empty file in Box 15 awaits future re-discovery of Siegfried Trebitsch’s letters to Shaw, which were requisitioned by the Public Trustee in 1960 while the whole bequest still was at the British Museum. These were made available to lawyers representing Shaw’s German-language translator during ongoing litigation with the publishing firm of William Heinemann. Authority to remove does not seem to have ensured power to return, and the letters may now be in some legal archive, if they were not retained by members of the Trebitsch family or destroyed. (See Samuel A. Weiss (ed.), Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Siegfried Trebitsch (1986), viii–ix.)

Any researcher, turning over the detritus of Shaw’s creative life (contracts and agreements, bank statements, counterfoils, receipts, hotel bills, and, yes, a methodical record of tips, even a pawn ticket for Lucinda Carr Shaw’s gold chain) is likely to ponder questions of underlying motives for keeping it all and providing for its further indefinite preservation. Looking at the more formidable accounts, one notes how the first scattered fees develop into an ever-increasing flow that would leave a prodigious fortune (for a man of letters), despite the enormous income tax and supertax paid out and the more fluctuating earnings of late years. Considered together with Shaw-related material in the archive of the Society of Authors at the British Library, the BLPES Shaw Papers demonstrate how writing could be established as a properly rewarded, economically viable profession. Evident here is the love of efficiency that made the Webbs’ painstaking amassing of facts so admirable to GBS as a solid foundation for policy. Along with the carefulness about small sums of money that he had needed to practice in his days of poverty, went a profound scrupulousness in financial matters. (He complained about taxation, but did not evade it.) Whatever hands it came into, by whatever means, money was made by human labor and was worthy of respect. A devious man in other areas of conduct, the inventor of Louis Dubedat writes with conviction when explaining kindly to Esmé Percy that to postdate a cheque is a dishonorable action (CL 4: 288).

A special agreement with the firm of Constable (in which he eventually became a shareholder) left him to an unusual degree in charge of the processes of publishing his own work: by-passing editors, dealing directly with printers and binders, able to impose his own systems of orthography and punctuation and his own (or William Morris’s) aesthetic judgment on the physical appearance of the text. Only rarely and casually, in the correspondence that accompanies the impersonal documents throughout this collection, can Shaw be glimpsed acting as his own, unsurpassed, publicity agent, although a confidence in the quality of the product on offer is all-pervasive. There is ample evidence here of how intent he was on developing the many possible channels of distribution for his work, making this an obvious resource for studying the dissemination of his influence and the fluctuations in his popularity.

The correspondence extends our knowledge of a variety of Shavian topics, activities, and relationships, and an assiduous researcher will want to sift it all for particular illuminations. Some of the letters are drafts from Shaw; letters addressed to him are frequent; occasionally he is an interested third party (as with Maurice Browne writing to Granville Barker on the 1916 American tour of Androcles and the Lion). Unexpected items enliven the whole, ranging from an English version of St. Patrick’s Lorica (echoed by Keegan in John Bull’s Other Island), among the real estate papers, to an extended draft paragraph in the 1905 engagement diary (third “Memoranda” page at front) for a lecture on Darwin to the Fabian Society the following March, or the exchange between GBS, in bullying mode, and would-be translator Stéphane Epstein-Estienne, the latter winning a moral victory with a sharp put-down, amid the Augustin Hamon correspondence. Efficiency breaks down under pressure from other tendencies in Shaw’s character in his loyal attachment to inadequate but freely appointed translators. How different, one wonders, would have been his reception in France if he had accepted Lugné-Poe’s suggestion that his company use a version of Mrs Warren’s Profession by “M. Willy (qui a fait Claudine)”—Colette, in fact, to whose early work Willy was putting his signature.

Here, too, is a confidential report written for Shaw on the viability of setting up a British film company; and a correspondence, including a long letter from Éamon de Valera, indicating how close they had come to setting up a government-backed Irish film company. The traces of Gabriel Pascal’s late, abortive attempts to keep on filming Shaw plays seem mere embroidery on the larger vision of successfully translating Shavian comedy to the screen that a younger, less tired Shaw might have realized and that remains a challenge for the next century.

A very helpful handlist, The Business and Financial Papers of George Bernard Shaw (1997), compiled by Emma Taverner, is available in the Archives Reading Room, where there is access also to a database for information on Shaw-related material in other collections within the library. In a different category of holdings is the permanent deposit of Shaw’s massive collection of photographs by the National Trust as owners of “Shaw’s Corner.” Access to these is now possible, but the contents have not yet been catalogued. Numerous Shaw items appear also among the Passfield Papers (Passfield being the name under which Sidney Webb took his seat in the House of Lords). The earliest letter from Shaw to Webb that survives was written in 1891, and letters between Shaw and his friends the Webbs are prominent among general correspondence 1892–1947. Additionally, correspondence with both the Shaws, included in Passfield section 10, is devoted to LSE matters. Two specimens of Shaw’s proof-reading and annotation of work by the Webbs are included in Passfield section 7: from 1920, “A Constitution for the socialist commonwealth of Great Britain” (first slip proof), and c. 1923, a draft of four pages of the Introduction to The Decay of Capitalist Civilization.

Passfield section 11, concerned with the New Statesman (also launched by the Webbs with financial backing from Shaw and others) contains a few transcripts of letters that reflect his turbulent relations with the journal in the first world war; and, in a letter of 26 October 1924, GBS comments on the treatment of editor Clifford Sharp. Section 9, which relates to the Fabian Society, will be of interest to anyone tracking Shaw through the official Fabian Society archives, also now at the LSE, following the Historical Manuscripts Commission survey of its contents.

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Some Principal Shaw Research Sources