Introduction to Shaw, Journalist

[The Great War was] a war of ideals. Liberal ideals, Feudal ideals, National ideals, Dynastic ideals, Republican ideals, Church ideals, State ideals, and Class ideals, bourgeois and proletarian, all heaped into a gigantic pile of spiritual high explosive, and then shoveled daily into every house with the morning milk by the newspapers.

—Bernard Shaw, Preface to 1922 reprint of The Quintessence of Ibsenism

In a December 1900 letter, Bernard Shaw offered his opinion to Frank Harris, former editor of the Fortnightly Review as well as of the Saturday Review, about Harris's desire to start another journal. "We're too old for it: journalism is not for men over forty," Shaw told Harris, "What you have to do now is to make your will, so to speak, in a series of dramas, tales or what you will."¹ Undaunted, Harris returned to newspaper proprietorship the following year with Candid Friend, which he edited unsuccessfully for little more than a year. It ran long enough, however, for Harris to publish an interview with Shaw. A journalist since the 1880s, Shaw had ended his career as a full-time critic in 1898 on Harris's Saturday Review, and in this interview with his old editor he spoke about the job of journalism:

Daily journalism is a superhuman profession: excellence in it is quite beyond mortal strength and endurance. Consequently, it trains literary men to scamp their work. A weekly feuilleton is at least possible. I did one for ten years. I took extraordinary pains—all the pains I was capable of—to get to the bottom of everything I wrote about. … Ten years of such work, at the rate of two thousand words a week or thereabouts—say, roughly, a million words—all genuine journalism, dependent on the context of the week's history for its own effect, was an apprenticeship which made me master of my own style.²

Shaw's career as a professional journalist was crucial to the type of writer he later became. His beginnings in mid-1880s London working on daily and weekly papers as well as more specialist journals coincided with the rise of New Journalism.³ He would later say, with some pride, "think of me as heading one of the pioneer columns of what was then called the New Journalism."⁴ One can argue that Shaw contributed to the higher ideals of the movement whose more sensationalist aspects soon developed into what became known as tabloid journalism, in which fellow Dubliner Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliff) would become the most prominent practitioner as proprietor of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. Shaw wrote for many of New Journalism's better-known editors: W. T. Stead at the Pall Mall Gazette, T. P. O'Connor at The Star, H. W. Massingham at The Star, the Daily Chronicle, and The Nation, Ernest Parke at The Star and North London News, and Clement Shorter at The Star and Illustrated London News, while Thomas Marlowe (also Irish and a longtime editor at Harmsworth's Daily Mail) and Robert Donald (a later editor of the Daily Chronicle) were other notable colleagues from his early days on The Star.⁵ Except for Stead (the figure most associated with the beginnings of New Journalism) at the Pall Mall Gazette, all these later editors apprenticed, in a sense, under The Star's founder and first editor, T. P. O'Connor, an Irish member of Parliament familiarly known as "Tay Pay." H. W. Massingham, The Star's first deputyeditor, became over the years Shaw's closest professional colleague in the hurly-burly of London's political journalism right through the end of Massingham's tenure as editor of the political and literary weekly The Nation in 1923, where he became editor in 1907.

Massingham had first suggested Shaw's name to O'Connor for the job of assistant leader writer prior to The Star's first issue in January 1888, and later, when editor of The Nation in the first quarter of the twentieth century, as Massingham's offices happened to be in Adelphi Terrace where...