The New Journalism

Bernard Shaw
and His
Contemporaries
BERNARD SHAW,
W. T. STEAD, AND
THE NEW JOURNALISM
Whitechapel, Parnell,
Titanic, and the Great War
Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel
Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries
Series Editors
Massachusetts Maritime Academy, Pocasset,
Massachusetts, USA
Peter Gahan
Independent Scholar, Los Angeles,
California, USA
The series Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries presents the best and
most up-to-date research on Shaw and his contemporaries in a diverse range
of cultural contexts. Volumes in the series will further the academic under-
standing of Bernard Shaw and those who worked with him, or in reaction
against him, during his long career from the 1880s to 1950 as a leading
writer in Britain and Ireland, and with a wide European and American
following.
Shaw defined the modern literary theatre in the wake of Ibsen as a vehicle
for social change, while authoring a dramatic canon to rival Shakespeare’s.
His careers as critic, essayist, playwright, journalist, lecturer, socialist, fem-
inist, and pamphleteer, both helped to shape the modern world as well as
pointed the way towards modernism. No one engaged with his contempo-
raries more than Shaw, whether as controversialist, or in his support of
other, often younger writers. In many respects, therefore, the series as it
develops will offer a survey of the rise of the modern at the beginning of the
twentieth century and the subsequent varied cultural movements covered
by the term modernism that arosein the wake of World War 1.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14785
Bernard Shaw,
W. T. Stead, and the
New Journalism
Whitechapel, Parnell, Titanic, and the Great War
Pocasset, Massachusetts
USA
Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries

ISBN 978-3-319-49006-9 ISBN 978-3-319-49007-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49007-6
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For Deirdre
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The impulse to write this volume began to emerge while working on my

previous book, Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation (2011).
During the process of writing the earlier book, I became extremely
intrigued by Bernard Shaw’s involvement in politics outside of, or beyond,
his dramatic canon, even to the detriment of his theatrical career. Much of
this book grew from working on Shaw’s 1910 Dublin lecture “The Poor
Law and Destitution in Ireland.” I was fascinated with Shaw’s public efforts
on behalf of the political causes that he believed in, even after such efforts
had no role in financially sustaining his existence. My affinity for this aspect
of Shaw’s life and career then came into focus for me, quite dramatically,
when I read a lecture authored and delivered by Michael D. Higgins,
president of Ireland. Specifically, the lecture was delivered on February
21, 2012 at the London School of Economics and Politics, of which Shaw
was one of the founders in 1895. The lecture, “On Public Intellectuals,
Universities and a Democratic Crisis” was delivered during the early months
of Higgins’ presidency.
President Higgins spoke passionately on the public role, indeed the
public duty that intellectuals need to embrace and pursue in bettering our
world. In fact, the lecture intimated that Shaw had epitomized the role of
public intellectual in his many efforts to improve our collective human
existence. The lecture, in many respects, directed me to an almost spiritual
realization of Shaw’s role, not only with regard to Ireland and Britain, but to
the human race—this being a role Shaw pursued for at least seven decades. I
am extremely grateful to President Higgins for inspiring me to this
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
realization which, after some contemplation, propelled me to focus on

Shaw’s journalistic efforts outside of his art, literary, music, and theatre
criticism. I consider President Higgins to be The President for the Irish
everywhere, and a remarkable individual who embodies and lives the Shaw
model of a public intellectual in his tireless efforts to improve our entire
world. He is a president who raises our conscious awareness to our respec-
tive duties to follow Shaw’s example, and his own example, within the dark
times we live in. So I express great thanks, admiration, and friendship to
President Higgins.
I also wish to express great thanks to series editor and close friend, Peter
Gahan. Peter’s willingness to read the various drafts of this manuscript over
two and half years—and his subsequent comments and recommendations,
which proved to be invaluable—is appreciated beyond any words that I can
collect and adequately express. To know Peter is to know a remarkable
scholar, indeed, one of the great Shavian scholars of my generation, and of
the many to follow.
I also must acknowledge Professor Alan Brody for first introducing me to
Shaw, all those many years ago in Saratoga, New York, when he cast me, an
undergraduate at the time, as Major Swindon in The Devil’s Disciple. In time
it proved to be an important experience. Thinking then that I knew some-
thing of method acting, I approached the role with the “method,” but
eventually realized (actually during the play’s run) that acting Shaw in my
then sense of the method was not working. I came to realize that the words
and actions of Swindon were far more important than any character an
inexperienced actor might create. Swindon was not the stuff of psycholog-
ical drama, but rather an image of a serviceable tool to his political, in this
case imperial, masters. What was needed was a talking image of a dull-
witted, lower-level aristocrat, the type that in the late eighteenth cen-
tury—even into the twentieth century—dominated officers in the British
military. They were the tools who enacted imperial law at the expense of
reason and common sense and, in the context of Shaw’s play and the
historical facts of 1777 Saratoga, eventually cost Britain its colonies.
In this vein, I also thank mentor Professor Don B. Wilmeth. His encour-
agement and nudging me toward Shaw during and after my doctoral work
at Brown University, is always appreciated, as was his suggestion that
Palgrave Macmillan might be open to a Shaw series.
Tomas René, commissioning editor at Palgrave Macmillan who handles
the Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries series is thanked for his work on
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
this project, as is April James, also of Palgrave Macmillan’s London office,

for leading this book into and through the production process.
Great thanks are also extended to the Society of Authors, on behalf of the
Bernard Shaw Estate, for permission to quote from Shaw’s journalism,
works, and letters.
I also extend thanks to Desmond Harding for encouraging me to pre-
print and present Shaw’s 1888 commentary on the Whitechapel murders in
the specially themed Shaw volume that he edited, Shaw and the City. This
exercise led me to reconsider Shaw’s approach to the Whitechapel events,
change my focus on the work from an examination of public hysteria to a
journalistic response to the sensational popular press that created the West
End hypocrisy toward the murders, and to consider W. T. Stead’s role in the
process. In this vein, I also thank Kathryn Mudgett, who invited me to
present a plenary on Shaw’s take on the Titanic sinking at the maritime
conference she hosted at Massachusetts Maritime Academy on April
12, 2012, the centennial of the Titanic’s meeting with a north Atlantic
iceberg. I also thank Professor Mudgett for publishing said plenary as “G.
B. Shaw and the Titanic Hysteria” in the 2013 The Nautilus: A Journal of
Maritime Literature, History, and Culture, Volume IV. This work exercise,
in turn, led me to totally reconsider Shaw’s response, moving again from
mere reaction to the public hysteria to his careful, courageous, and biting
journalistic countering of the Stead-inspired popular press that lied to the
British and American publics, rather than encourage reasonable focus on the
causes of the calamity in order to prevent future occurrences. These two
exercises helped me to realize that Shaw’s responses to the above two public
crises (and others like them) did not mirror the undisciplined public frenzies
in evidence at the time, but rather demonstrated his long-practiced and
intelligent journalism that struck at the foundation of public distress over
the disasters. Hence, this volume emerged between 2013 and 2016 as a
study on Shaw’s important, but never previously explored, brand of jour-
nalism that engaged with and countered that offered by his contemporary,
W. T. Stead.
Thanks are also extended to work and department colleague Elaine
Craghead, whose conversation has helped to maintain an even keel while
at work—the importance of which, for writing, cannot be underestimated.
Ian O’Hare is thanked for his original artwork that graces the cover of
this book. He carefully considered the book’s directions, then conceived
and created the image. His permission to use the work is gratefully
acknowledged.
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I also express great thanks to my dear friend Audrey McNamara, whose

friendship on all things Shaw and much more, has meant a great deal since
the beginning of our correspondence in the months leading up to her highly
successful and influential Dublin Shaw conference in 2012, which was
opened by President Higgins—and where I delivered one of the three
plenary lectures. Audrey, an important Shavian scholar in her own right,
has been a valuable sounding board for many of the ideas developed in
this book.
I also thank my nieces, Alex and Sasha, and their mother Anna, for
continuing to be supportive. Brother-in-law Carlo DeBenedictis, for those
long nights over wine, must also be acknowledged for the notion of rebirth.
My late parents Brenda Kelly and Frank are never far from my scholar-
ship, which they so supported in its early days. Brenda is always remembered
for making sure I was connected to the past, specifically to her Ireland.
My partner and wife Carolina is greatly thanked too. Quite simply, this
book, as my previous book, could not have been written without her love
and input. I cannot express this enough. She has tolerated my various
writing moods while I balanced the duties of chairing a department. Surely
such tolerance is monumental.
Finally, I thank Deirdre. Her assistance in writing this book was exten-
sive, and perhaps was more than she knew, but I doubt that.
CONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
2 Stead and the Whitechapel Frenzy 9
3 Parnell, Disarmament, and the Morality Frenzy 59
4 Stead, Russia, and Titanic 103
5 War 153
6 Epilogue 217
Bibliography 227
Index 239
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
This volume explores Bernard Shaw’s journalism outside his literary, art,
music, and theater criticism from the mid 1880s through the Great War—a
period in which Shaw contributed, arguably, some of the most powerful and
socially relevant journalism the Western world has experienced. Shaw fre-
quently used his journalism to publicize his plays, books, and lectures, but
he could also be an acute and powerful journalist outside of self-promo-
tion—which is the focus of this book. Shaw found, sharpened, and reached
his critical voice as a committed journalist during the mid to late 1880s—
just as New Journalism was being pioneered and developed. Shaw’s emerg-
ing sense of journalism through this period was a precursor to his important
literary criticism and plays of the early 1890s that introduced New Drama,
as well as his journalistic books that began with The Quintessence of Ibsenism
in 1893. In fact, Shaw’s playwriting career and political activism owed
much, if not everything to his journalistic efforts, which, in turn, pointed
the way toward the modern. After all, Shaw lived and worked through the
golden age of modernizing journalism.
Recent Shaw scholarship has expanded the understanding that Shaw the
dramatist wrote in reaction to and borrowing from differing playwrights.
For example, John Bertolini’s “Wilde and Shakespeare in Shaw’s You Never
Can Tell” demonstrates that Shaw wrote at times in reaction to Shakespeare
and Oscar Wilde, and in my own Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist
Provocation I argue that Shaw wrote, also at times, in reaction to and
borrowing from fellow Dubliner John Millington Synge. Writing in specific
© The Author(s) 2017 1

N. O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Bernard Shaw, W. T. Stead, and the New
Journalism, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49007-6_1
2 N. O’CEALLAIGH RITSCHEL
reaction to other writers was also practiced by Shaw in his journalism,

which, of course, began to develop before he wrote his first plays.
In Shaw’s journalism, it is necessary to keep in mind that the developing
Shaw was emerging at a time when one of the most important figures of
New Journalism, a pioneer in a branch of that journalism, was achieving
startling and arresting successes that more than once moved the British
government into action by defining, harnessing, and then directing public
opinion—W. T. Stead. Stead’s impact on London and Western journalism
was significant, and arguably led, for good and bad, to the exposé journal-
ism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But in the mid-1880s there
was no larger journalistic figure than Stead, and the young Shaw took
notice.
Achieving great success from 1884 to 1890 as editor of the daily Pall
Mall Gazette, Stead changed British and Western journalism forever. Rival
papers formed, or existing papers adapted to follow Stead’s example. Leader
writers and editors marched to Stead’s striking Pall Mall Gazette model—
adding to, expanding, and solidifying Stead’s journalism style. After the
Gazette, Stead founded, edited, and contributed to an almost endless
number of journals and papers, undertaking each with a feverish confidence
to change society for the better, and serving cause after cause to do so. As a
dedicated peace advocate during the militarism that gripped Europe from
the 1880s to 1914, a militarism that would lead the world into the Great
War, Stead was “several times nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize”
(Mulpetre). While usually not in agreement with Stead, Shaw monitored
Stead’s work for decades. Yet in a 1924 letter to Stead’s biographer Fred-
erick Whyte, Shaw wrote of Stead: “We never quarreled; but he was no use
to me” (qtd. in Whyte, 305). Contrary to being of no use to Shaw, Stead
proved to be of great use as both an influence and a catalyst to Shaw’s
journalism from the 1880s into the Great War, which started two years after
Stead’s death. And Stead, for his part, preserved Shaw’s early letters, even
before the advent of Shaw’s plays.
The importance Stead proved to be for Shaw was not because of the
former’s convictions and various causes—most of which Shaw loathed and
repeatedly attacked—but through Shaw’s reacting to and use of Stead’s
journalism. As Stead riled and rallied the public to his causes, his brand of
popular journalism often diverted its readership from careful consideration
of the situation. Shaw, on the other hand, sought exactly the opposite
through his journalism: the resurrection or instigation of common sense.
So just as Shaw wrote many of his plays in reaction to or borrowing from
INTRODUCTION 3
other dramatists—contemporaries or earlier playwrights—he developed and

wrote his journalism in reaction to, and, at times, borrowing from his
contemporary Stead and those who replicated Stead’s journalistic tactics—
including Stead’s tendency to lose causes to self-seduction as he pursued
self-promotion.
However, in 1884 and again in 1885, Stead also demonstrated to Shaw
and London the power of journalism to move governments to action. For
the newly joined Fabian Shaw, who subscribed to the early Fabian Society
philosophy of provoking gradual change, Stead’s journalism must have
appeared as fantastic, a clear vehicle for social change if used in the right
direction—but excessively dangerous if not. In 1885, at the height of
Stead’s early successes with the Pall Mall Gazette, Shaw joined the paper’s
staff reviewing popular novels, a position secured for him by William Archer.
Oscar Wilde was also a staff reviewer at the time. In his 1924 letter to
Frederick Whyte, Shaw stated that Stead “was unable to distinguish us from
the office boy” (qtd. in Whyte, 304–305). Regardless of Stead’s perceived
inability to recognize brilliance, Stead’s presence was to be immense
for Shaw.
In examining Shaw’s journalism, in relation to Stead and others, it is
prudent to consider the historical context of Shaw’s efforts. It is only
through such context that the journalism can be appreciated, and its
power of countering and provoking recognized. In doing so, we will
understand that Shaw was not only a giant in New Drama, but also a
force when his voice was needed in New Journalism where he worked
against his journalistic contemporaries who preferred popularity over facts.
Shaw countered their sensationalized absurdities used to drive the British
public into irrational hysteria to sell more and more papers through frenzied
crusades at any cost. The struggle and conflict between their contrasting
journalistic efforts was as much a part of the modernizing process as was
Shaw and his dramatist contemporaries in forging New Drama.
The structure of this book, rather than pursuing all of Shaw’s massive
journalistic output, including his frequently acknowledged but sparingly
explored achievements as a music and drama critic, examines high profile
historical crises in which Shaw contributed journalistically. These examples,
representing unimagined horror, ruthless moral persecution, dangerous
romanticism, and massive manufactured death, delivered serious conse-
quences for Britain, Ireland, and beyond—and therefore prompted power-
ful commentary from Shaw. The examples illuminate how the journalist in
Shaw endeavored to provoke public debate and social change, while

matching or even defining the highest ideals of New Journalism.
Chapter 2 traces Stead’s rise to prominence and dominance, as witnessed
by a young Shaw determined to write, on the London journalistic front,
where Stead achieved his first great success through his series of articles
“The Truth about the Navy” in 1884. The series, under the guise of
defending the empire, forced William Gladstone’s Liberal government to
reverse its efforts to reduce naval spending. The following year, Stead
attained even greater success when he took aim at the horrific practice of
child prostitution in a series titled “The Maiden Tribute to Modern Baby-
lon.” Shaw and most of London were outraged at the situation, with the
result that the government raised the age of consent, with increased penal-
ties for those trafficking in child prostitution. This success, which increased
the comfortable and middle classes’ awareness of prostitution in general,
including fascination as well as concern, was met by the formation of
competing evening papers that attempted to replicate the Pall Mall
Gazette’s success and further Stead’s journalistic style.
One such paper appeared in 1888, The Star, founded and edited by T. P.
O’Connor. O’Connor made his own mark in New Journalism by
employing editors and writers of future note, including, if briefly, Shaw as
a political writer. Into this atmosphere appeared a series of heinous murders
during the late summer and autumn of 1888 in East London’s economically
distressed districts known as Whitechapel and its adjacent Spitalfields. The
victims, all women in severe poverty who worked in prostitution to some
extent for survival, were savagely slaughtered. Stead, through his paper, was
quick to seize on the killings—as was The Star and eventually all London
papers, even The Times—and generated public frenzy that prompted a
carnival of solutions to the crisis, except for a reasonable and rational plan
that could alleviate the stifling poverty that the fantastic press, oddly,
revealed. While the murder press coverage gripped all Londoners, Shaw
was moved to respond journalistically and did so with an early example of his
brilliant take on the situation—contextualizing the crisis while offering a
viable solution. It was, in many respects, the beginning of Shaw’s important
journalism.
Chapter 3 follows the sensationally charged journalism, as well as the
moral backlash from the Whitechapel murders, into the divorce suit filed by
Captain William O’Shea against his wife Katharine that named the leader of
the Irish Party, Charles Stewart Parnell as co-respondent. The London
popular press, led again by Stead, seized on the divorce case once it was
INTRODUCTION 5
heard in court in November 1890, when neither Katharine O’Shea nor

Parnell contested the accusations. The press pursuit of scandal, calling for
the Liberal Party to disengage itself from the Irish Party if Parnell remained
as leader, drew Shaw to respond journalistically. He did so twice in The Star,
where he argued that the criminal in the matter was not Parnell, but the
antiquated divorce laws that imprisoned women in unhappy marriages. In
his second response, Shaw expanded his criticism to the Liberal Party as it
joined the popular press in moralistically demanding Parnell’s resignation or
removal. Shaw’s animosity towards the Liberal Party grew and became
entrenched as their attacks on Parnell increased. Shaw’s masterful press
letters on behalf of Parnell, or most definitely against those who opposed
Parnell, exposed the absurdities and hypocrisy of the morality position. This
episode coincided with Shaw’s increased interest in women’s rights, just as
he composed The Quintessence of Ibsenism, in which he exposed Stead’s
notion of the ideal woman as nothing but grotesquely subservient to men.
Following the Parnell case, Chapter 3 then moves to Shaw’s observations
of Stead’s new journalistic, but still moralist, career path that included
authoring books such as If Christ Came to Chicago, based on a series of
articles for his newly formed monthly Review of Reviews. Stead’s book
chronicled his moralizing visit to crime-laden Chicago as the 1893 World’s
Fair came to a close. Stead’s return to London saw his journalism shift to
advocacy for world peace, which became a crusade that pulled Shaw in—but
the two men were not always in agreement. Stead continued his public
fascination with Russia’s autocratic ruling tsars, including Nicholas II who
in 1898 called for European disarmament. Instead of rallying to echo
Stead’s support for the tsar’s peace initiative, Shaw took aim in London’s
Daily Chronicle at the militarism that was the growing London vogue,
despite claims for peace overtures, as epitomized by the Navy League’s
commemoration of the Battle of Trafalgar in the face of Britain’s then ally
France.
Chapter 4 moves into the years following the premier productions of
some of Shaw’s important plays, Man and Superman, John Bull’s Other
Island, Major Barbara, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Getting Married, Fanny’s
First Play, and Androcles and the Lion, as Shaw enjoyed a great reputation
not only as a playwright, but also as a public intellectual, the latter being
achieved most immediately through his journalism and public lectures. In
1912, as Shaw was increasing his activism against destitution, Stead
accepted an invitation to travel to New York to speak on world peace. He
boarded what had become one of the largest news events up to that time:
the White Star Line’s Titanic. While Stead disappeared with the ship, his
brand of journalism erupted into unprecedented extremes in sensationaliz-
ing the ship’s loss, romantically celebrating the unquestioned and often
fictitious heroism of first-class passengers—including Stead—and ship’s
officers, most particularly Titanic’s Captain Edward Smith. The popular
press coverage, raging as if nothing else mattered, at the very least obscured
the facts of the sinking, which if known and understood, could have led to
the prevention of such a catastrophic event from occurring again. Shaw
responded journalistically in the Daily News, undermining the London
press’ repeated romanticizing of the call for “Women and Children First”
in the lifeboats. Shaw detailed the facts concerning Lifeboat No. 1 that
carried only twelve people to safety, despite having the capacity for forty,
and only two were women—the aristocratic couture designer Lady Duff
Gordon and her assistant. Shaw’s article led directly to Duff Gordon and her
husband testifying at the British Board of Trade Inquiry into the ship’s
sinking.
Shaw’s journalistic response to the Titanic frenzy also questioned and
criticized the popular press’ repeated celebrations of the ship’s captain as a
hero, when much of the responsibility for the sinking rested with him.
Shaw’s press criticism was challenged in the same paper by Arthur Conan
Doyle, who not only disagreed with Shaw’s view, but questioned Shaw’s
journalistic integrity. A press exchange ensued, with Shaw revealing only the
truth, not sentimental romances that prevented real consideration. But by
taking the view that he did (going against popular thinking that celebrated
the ship’s captain, and other stories based on fantasy rather than facts) Shaw
revealed that he possessed the courage to contribute a voice of reason when
it was needed, no matter the risk of unpopularity that could befall him. In
two years Shaw would again demonstrate this courage, going much further
as the circumstances required, as he responded to the outbreak of the Great
War. It was a courage that rivaled Stead’s courage during the Boer War
when he had publicly opposed and criticized a mostly popular war.
Chapter 5 focuses on Shaw’s journalistic response to the Great War, from
the months prior to its outbreak when he could see the disastrous potential
of the ruling Liberal government’s foreign policy as Western militarism
became uncontrollable, to the government’s bumbling early months of
the war. Shaw’s first responses to the war were through his journalism,
especially as the popular press in Stead’s tradition, blindly supported ram-
pant militarism, British Junkerism, and the government’s leadership
through both its Foreign Office and its War Office. Shaw began first with
INTRODUCTION 7
some well-placed words in the press, including an interview he granted to

American syndicated journalist Mary Boyle O’Reilly. His early war views
were carried throughout America as his journalistic letters to the London
press—of those published—were replicated directly or in part in American
papers and in papers throughout the British Empire. This was particularly
the case with New Zealand and Australia; both contributed thousands of
soldiers to the European killing trenches.
But Shaw’s greatest war response was arguably his finest journalism, and
perhaps the finest journalism ever composed, titled Common Sense About the
War, published in November 1914 as a supplement to the New Statesman.
Examples of Shaw’s war responses are contextualized, revealing the strength
of his absolute journalism, absolute in the sense that it served only the truth
and—as with all of his important journalism—questioned and criticized that
which desperately needed to be questioned and criticized during the Great
War. The importance of the war, namely its catastrophic casualties, required
Shaw’s intervention as a journalist, and he delivered with great courage.
While relentlessly criticized in late 1914, even by editors who had been his
colleagues and friends, Shaw blazed the trail of modern democratic jour-
nalism. The result was that within months of Common Sense About the
War’s publication, fellow Dubliner Lord Northcliffe, a journalist who
owned numerous popular London papers including The Times, set aside
his early War patriotic propaganda and followed Shaw’s example of criticiz-
ing and questioning the government’s inept war policies and practices.
Shaw’s role in New Journalism from the 1880s into and through the
Great War, reflected, even more directly than his plays at times, the mod-
ernizing movement which led the way to modernism, particularly as the
horrors of the war affirmed Shaw’s war journalism. A greater social aware-
ness, whether fully informed or not, emerged for readers by the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries: a readership far more numerous than
in any previous historical period due to the greater levels of literacy, and
which led to greater social debate. That debate was undoubtedly enriched
by Shaw who cut through the popular jumbled directions of London’s
mainstream press. When the press and developments required Shaw’s direct
and immediate commentary, he responded in London’s mainstream papers.
When corporal punishment in the British navy was raised by a correspon-
dent to the London Times in 1904, Shaw entered the debate through a
series of letters denouncing naval floggings. The debate was taken up by a
vice admiral, who dismissed Shaw as “feeble minded” (Ford, “Notes,” 41).
Shaw responded: “I submit to your correspondents, without the smallest
respect, that all this is claptrap, good enough, perhaps, for a nautical
melodrama in an island booth, but out of place in a serious discussion.”
Shaw struck to the truth about flogging as a naval discipline: “The radical
objection to flogging is not its cruelty, but the fact that it can never be
cleared from the suspicion that it is a vicious sport disguised as reformatory
justice” (“Flogging in the Navy,” 41–42). Indeed.
Whether commenting on major and vicious or dangerous developments,
or commenting on the more mundane, Shaw’s journalism was powerful,
direct, immediate, and always the deliverer of truth and reason, with the
intent of instilling the same into the greater public toward a more socially
just society. It was a journalism that advocated a modernizing world with
modernizing social values.
REFERENCES
Ford, Robert. “Notes.” The Letters of Bernard Shaw to The Times. Dublin: Irish
Academic Press, 2007. 41.
Mulpetre, Owen. The Great Educator: A Biography of W. T. Stead. 2012. http://
www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/ (accessed October 2, 2015).
Shaw, George Bernard. “Flogging in the Navy.” The Letters of Bernard Shaw to The
Times. Robert Ford, ed., 41–44. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007.
Whyte, Frederick. The Life of W. T. Stead. London: Jonathan Cape, 1925.
CHAPTER 2
Stead and the Whitechapel Frenzy
In November 1914, three months after the Great War had commenced,
Bernard Shaw published his Common Sense About the War as a supplement
to the New Statesman.1 Representing Shaw’s great and sane response to the
British patriotic jingoism that was overpowering public thought in Britain
once war had been declared through a questionable British foreign policy,
the article was prompted by Shaw’s dutiful attempt to present reason to a
hysterical, if patriotic, British public. In essence, it was an effort to stir, once
again, an hysterical public toward rational consideration—all in an attempt
to provoke social change.
In the opening paragraph of Common Sense About the War, Shaw states,
“I shall retain my Irish capacity for criticizing England with something of
the detachment of a foreigner, and perhaps, with a certain slightly malicious
taste for the taking the conceit out of her” (Common Sense 16). Thirty years
later, in the throes of a second world war, Shaw ended a letter to Sydney
Cockerell by similarly explaining himself: “I am an Irish Londoner; but
retain my Irish citizenship and nature, and am still a foreigner with an
objective view (invaluable) of England, that ‘distressful country’ in whose
public service I am a missionary” (Collected Letters, IV, 725). In the same
letter, written when he was eighty-eight years old, Shaw related his views on
a London monument to his career: “What I should like as a London
monument is a replica on the Embankment of the full length statue of me
in my platform pose as an orator by Troubetskoy, which is now in the
National Gallery in Dublin” (Letters, IV, 724). In other words, Shaw

Journalism, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49007-6_2
preferred a monument to Shaw the public commentator, rather than merely

a monument to Shaw the dramatist.
Shaw’s plays, of course, were part of his public role as the intellectual
critic of British society, but they only began to surface after Shaw’s public
activism had been established, evolving through public lectures, essays, and
letters to the press. Finding his voice in the mid-1880s through the Fabian
Society and his own developing socialism, Shaw—as the Irish foreigner—
emerged as the objective and reasoned critic within London. The 1880s
were a decade in which Michael Holroyd notes, Shaw “laboriously
perfected his technique” (Letters, I, 193). Shaw’s emergence in the 1880s
coincided with the onslaught of the “new journalism.” In fact, Shaw later
recalled of his early journalism: “think of me as heading one of the pioneer
columns of what was then called The New Journalism” (Autobiography,
220). Archibald Henderson concurs that Shaw was among the young
journalists in the 1880s who “rose up in revolt against academicism in
[writing] style,” and helped to usher in the New Journalism (Henderson,
199). This label for the new type of journalism, solidified in the 1880s, was
penned by Matthew Arnold in a May 1887 article criticizing the Irish Home
Rule Movement, as led by Irish Party leader Charles Stewart Parnell, and
introduced in 1886 as a failing Bill to Parliament by the recent Liberal Prime
Minister, William Gladstone. Arnold saw similarities between Home Rule
supporters in Britain—namely Liberal Party supporters—and the audience
for the new journalism. Arnold defined both as being “featherbrained” (qtd.
in Schults, 29). While not naming the editor, Arnold inferred that the new
journalism had been invented by W. T. Stead.
In 2001, L. Perry Curtis reflectively argued that the new journalism, or,
more to the point, the new type of news reporting in the 1880s had its roots
earlier in the nineteenth century in crime reporting, and stipulated that
Stead instead expanded sensational and shock journalism far beyond what
had been the norm in nineteenth-century London journalism (Curtis, 79).
The pre-Stead sensational journalism, the norm as the middle classes grew
and working-class literacy was furthered, had emerged through crime
reporting that had developed from roughly 1830 to 1880, which increas-
ingly focused on violence; the results of which were often recounted in
detailed press reports on autopsies. All of such contributed to a press and
public fascination with murder and violence, even leading some individuals
to “travel miles to visit the murder site and wander around in search of a
souvenir to take home” (Curtis, 69). Coinciding with these developments
was the onslaught of newspaper reporting on “ship and train wrecks, great
STEAD AND THE WHITECHAPEL FRENZY 11
fires, exploding boilers, military battles,” all facilitating the fascination with
violent death or maiming as industrialization grew beyond mid-century
(Curtis, 69). But in expanding sensationalizing journalism into lurid details
and graphic titillation under eye-grabbing headers for leaders, Stead
pioneered the mass production of modern sensationalism and shock to
match the late nineteenth-century technological advancements in printing
presses (Curtis, 62). No longer were columns of print presented in one
universal and conforming font. Furthermore, in casting off the old practices
of “printing long transcripts from a trial” in favor of summarizing “the
proceedings and then describing the leading actors in the courtroom,”
Stead helped to introduce a style of journal writing that spoke to middle-
and working-class readers—eradicating the academic style of impersonal
and standoffish writing (Curtis, 62). While Shaw assisted in furthering the
new writing style, the shock aspect of Stead’s journalism was decidedly not
the direction of Shaw’s early journalism (Curtis, 61, 79). But as David
Bowman asserted, “it was impossible [for Shaw] to escape him: Stead was
the nosiest and most prolific journalist in London” from the 1880s to his
death three decades later (Bowman, 29).
In fact, in 1885, one year after the young Shaw joined the Fabian Society
in London, and a year after Stead’s journalism changed the British Empire’s
annual navy expenditure, Stead, as the relatively new editor of London’s
evening daily The Pall Mall Gazette, “achieved notoriety by exposing the
silent horrors of child prostitution in London” (Curtis, 79).2 In addition to
selling newspapers, Stead fashioned himself as a social crusader, which
perhaps was his most significant attribute—coming to the fore as radicals,
socialists, and anarchists were advocating social and revolutionary change. It
was to be a decade of modernizing movement—and horror.
STEAD, NAVY, PROSTITUTION, RIOT, AND SHAW

In 1884, shortly after becoming editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, Stead
commenced a series of articles on September 15, 1884 known as “The
Truth about the Navy.” The series had been prompted by Prime Minister
William Gladstone’s effort to reduce the British Navy’s annual budget—an
issue which had divided Gladstone’s Liberal cabinet. In the series’ first
article, Stead wrote:
The scramble for the world has begun in earnest. In the face of that phenom-
enon how far are we able to prevent our own possessions being scrambled by
our neighbours? The answer to that question depends upon the condition of
our navy. If it [the British Navy] is as strong as it ought to be, we have nothing
to fear. If, on the other hand, it is no longer in a position of incontestable
superiority to the navies of the world, we are in a position of peril too grave to
be capable of exaggeration. Not only our Imperial position, but the daily
bread of twenty millions out of thirty millions of our population depends
entirely upon our dominion of the sea. If that is lost, or even endangered, our
existence is at stake. (qtd. in Schults, 91)
To avoid any confusion as to his and his paper’s political allegiance, Stead
argued that the Liberal Party was “in a better position to build up the navy
than the Conservatives [Conservative Party] . . . . [being that] Liberals were
the free-trade party, which needed the navy to survive” (Schults, 91). Two
days later, Stead devoted six prominent pages of the paper to his navy
campaign, with sensational headers to his leaders as: “A STARTLING REVELA-
TION” and “THE TRUTH ABOUT THE NAVY” (qtd. in Schults, 92). Facts were
stretched and used by Stead’s emerging brand of journalism for popular
effect.
Stead proceeded by suggesting in his navy series that Britain was no
longer keeping pace with naval spending when compared to Germany,
France, Russia, and Italy (Schults, 92). As the age of steel ships had arrived,
as well as modern propelled torpedoes, Stead claimed that in these areas,
Britain was woefully underfunded: “If France is rich enough to pay for her
glory, is England not rich enough to pay for her insurance?” (qtd. in Schults,
93). By relentlessly pressing his navy series through September and
October—even to December—1884 by playing on, even creating, the
British public’s fear of being vulnerable to attack, the public was gradually
moved and Gladstone was forced to increase naval spending. Stead quickly
noted: “I have never written anything in my life [to then] which produced
so immediate and so overwhelming an effect on public opinion” (qtd. in
Schults, 101). This early success for Stead created and fed a quest for
altering and leading the general British public into directions he
selected—a dangerous and/or marvelous precedent had been set for dem-
ocratically leaning Britain. To a young, newly proclaimed Fabian socialist,
Stead’s gradual but quick success in altering public opinion must have been
very attractive—it certainly had to be noted.
The success of Stead’s navy series was based on his movement toward
sensationalizing public fear, especially with regard to the navies of fellow
European countries (whether true or not in 1884) and England’s historical
tradition of a strong navy. The very real result was one step toward British
militarization and another toward British animosity directed at its European
neighbors. In other words, Stead, through a series of newspaper articles, had
helped to nudge Britain into a European arms race; the impact of which
would have horrific results decades into the modern age, something that an
established and successful Shaw would remember well. The power and
danger of modern journalism in a free press had arrived. The young Shaw
needed to get to work.
Shaw joined the reviewing staff of The Pall Mall Gazette in May 1885,
months after Stead’s navy articles, mostly reviewing popular novels of little
literary value (Holroyd, I, 205). Two months later, in July, Stead ran a new
series of articles that made him the most well-known journalist in London,
under the banner of “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The young
Shaw may have felt at the time that there was no better paper to be affiliated
with, especially if Stead were to use his paper’s growing popular power for a
worthy social cause, which then seemed to be at hand.
The Babylon series on the surface exposed child prostitution within
London, and raised the collective bourgeois awareness of prostitution.
The articles also established Stead’s self-promoted role as social cru-
sader—and dramatically increased sales for the paper. His articles detailed
how a 13-year-old girl from the East London tenements was purchased for
£5 from her mother, removed from her home, chloroformed and inspected
to confirm virginity, and then deposited into a brothel. Competing editor
Frank Harris, of the Evening News, who would also eventually utilize
sensationalized journalism (but for conservative causes), criticized Stead’s
first installment of the Babylon series. Harris asserted that Stead’s “atrocious
and filthy forms of vice—vice so horrible that probably 99 out of a 100 are
unaware of its existence, even supposing that it does exist anywhere except in
the writer’s putrid imagination,” should not be publicized (qtd. in Holroyd,
I, 326). The insinuation, of course, was that Stead was unashamedly using
child prostitution, and maybe fabricating its existence, to sell papers. The
next day, Stead ran a header “To Our Friends the Enemy” (qtd. in Schults,
191). While the 1885 Shaw was apparently quickly drawn in by Stead’s
crusade, a more developed Shaw in 1894 borrowed and adapted Stead’s
leader line response to Harris’ condemnation for his play Arms and the
Man: in Act II when the foolish and conventionally over-romantic Sergius
discovers Bluntchli’s presence, he proclaims, “Welcome, our friend the
enemy!” (Complete Plays, III, 164). Of course, Harris had a point as Stead’s
new series was sensationalism and shock to the hilt, as evidenced by Stead’s
typical headers for the articles: “Why the Cries of the Victims are not
Heard,” “Strapping Girls Down,” “I Order Five Virgins,” and “A Child
of 13 Bought for £5” (qtd. in Robinson, 88). But Stead was making
bourgeois Londoners aware of prostitution as a social problem of abuse
that was thriving under London’s respectable surface.
Stead’s exposé of an insidious form of slavery, which he often depicted
graphically, was at first heralded by numerous Fabians and radicals, despite
the lurid details. Arguably, it was the realization of the London prostitution
system that moved some radicals at first. Brad Kent remarks that Shaw was
“horrified” by the described events (Kent, xxiii). In 1925 Stead’s biogra-
pher Frederic Whyte quoted a letter Shaw wrote to Stead during the 1885
sensationalism stirred up by the Babylon series: “If a practical protest is
needed, I am quite willing to take as many quires [sic] of the papers as I can
carry and sell them . . . in any thoroughfare in London” (qtd. in Whyte,
304–305). Stead’s exposé had raised so much public uproar, Parliament
suddenly and quickly passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which had
been under discussion and review for three years prior to Stead’s series
(Robinson, 74). The Act raised the age of female consent from thirteen to
sixteen years of age and increased penalties for streetwalkers and brothel-
keepers who violated the law (Kent, xxiii). Stead had raised London middle-
class awareness of prostitution and moved the government into action,
which was more than the numerous medical studies on prostitution had
done in the 1850s that focused on the economic crisis that fed prostitution.3
Stead and his new journalism had seemingly carried the day with regard to a
social crisis. It was the second time Stead had managed to shape public
opinion that led to government action—an extraordinary and impressive
achievement that was not lost on Shaw in 1885. However, it soon became
evident that Stead’s exposé of child prostitution was, as Shaw called it when
reflecting in 1924, “a put-up job, and that he [Stead] himself had put it up”
(qtd. in Whyte, 304–306).
When the mother of the featured 13-year-old child in Stead’s series tried
to find her daughter, with the help of police and rival journalists from Lloyd’s
Illustrated Newspaper, the child was located in France. Stead had staged the
entire scenario, from hiring a supposedly reformed brothel-keeper through
the Salvation Army who purchased the child with Stead’s money, then took
the child through the various steps, including delivering her to a brothel.
The child, Lily in Stead’s articles, was actually named Eliza Armstrong.
Stead had arranged most of the scenario with the Salvation Army’s Chief
of Staff Bramwell Booth. After the brothel stop, Eliza was taken to France
by a Salvation Army woman, arranged by Booth, and placed in domestic

service far removed from her family in East London (Weightman; Robin-
son, 84).
Stead was arrested, tried, and convicted of abduction as the mother
claimed she thought her daughter would be returned. Shaw, again in
1924, recalled that once the truth was known, “Nobody ever trusted him
[Stead] after . . . such a betrayal in our confidence in him” (qtd. in Whyte,
304). Of course, the Salvation Army’s role in the Babylon scenarios, in the
realm of theoretical salvation through the questionable means of Stead’s
sensationalism, provided some fodder for Shaw’s 1905 Major Barbara. And
in the 1913 Pygmalion, as Gavin Weightman outlines, Shaw replicated Eliza
Armstrong’s purchase for £5 through Professor Higgins purchasing Eliza
Doolittle for the same amount from her father—who never asks Higgins
what he is going to do with Eliza. Perhaps the father merely assumes the
sexual use and assumes she will be returned (Weightman). Furthermore, the
middle-class indignation Stead had generated against prostitution fed the
1893 Mrs. Warren’s Profession, where Shaw refined that indignation, which
was based on morality, by expressing dialogue in Act II on the economics
that lead to prostitution. However, plays from Shaw were still years away,
and in 1887 Stead returned after his imprisonment to The Pall Mall Gazette
and shock journalism, where he could only generate more popular
attention.
Following his release, Stead’s popularity and reputation, while tarnished
among some socialists, remained intact for most middle-class Londoners,
who remained outraged at the depravity of prostitution but failed to appre-
ciate the economic realities that forced a person into it in the first place.
Stead pushed forward and still on occasions leaned to the left, perhaps
courting socialists back to his side. He published a letter written to the
editor, himself, by Shaw on February 23, 1887, which argued that evicted
unemployed Londoners suffered as much, or more than evicted rural Irish
laborers. Shaw was drawing on the recent Glenbeigh evictions in County
Kerry, Ireland, and pointed out that while there was some bourgeois
sympathy in the London press and public for the evicted Irish, there was
no expressed sympathy for evicted unemployed London laborers. Shaw’s
pseudonymous letter, signed Jesse Dodd, is written as a London laborer,
claiming that “it is enough to make us go to the socialists” and closes with:
“Sir, if you suppress this letter to please persons in high stations, you are not
the man I take you for” (“Evictions,” 5). The argument of the letter would
be echoed, comically, by the British Hodson, of East London origins, in Act
III of Shaw’s 1904 play John Bull’s Other Island, when Hodson argues with
the Irish laborer Matthew Haffigan over which proletariat has suffered
more, the urban British or rural Irish. This remained a legitimate issue in
1904 as it had in 1887, and it revealed Shaw’s discontent with those
supporting the Liberal Party’s efforts on behalf of Irish Home Rule during
the 1880s and beyond, when the Party failed to consider, or address,
Ireland’s and Britain’s economic realities for the poor, in the face of various
levels of capitalism.
In June 1887, after Stead published a letter from John Ruskin attacking
The Pall Mall Gazette, Shaw wrote privately to Stead. Shaw’s long letter
proposed a Fabian agenda for Stead’s paper:
If I could palm a programme upon you as you have vainly tried to palm one on
Lord This and the rest of them, I should beg you to dish the Socialists by
helping to get back the land and the misappropriated capital for the people by
such measures as the municipalisation [sic] of town rents, the nationalisation
of railways, the sweeping away of our inexpressibly wicked workhouse
prisons in favour of state-owned farms and factories to which the wretches
who now drudge in our sweaters’ workshops should come for employment and
due reward, and utter the repudiation of the claim of the sweater (as the
incarnation of private enterprise) to be protected from the competition of the
whole people organized to secure their own welfare. (Collected Letters, I, 173)4
Shaw argued that the paper that championed the above, would contribute
to creating a public opinion among the middle class “to avert the social
decay which the increase of our population alone is surely bringing upon us”
(Collected Letters, I, 173). Such sentiment from Shaw was consistent with
his Fabian approach of gradualist reform of the middle class, but in typical
fashion, perhaps, Stead ignored the advice or failed to understand it—
although he saved Shaw’s letter. Shaw still in 1887 saw some possibilities
in Stead, or rather, Shaw saw value in propagandizing through a popular
paper—after all, Stead had used The Pall Mall Gazette to force the govern-
ment’s hand with its navy, and in addressing child prostitution. And, if Stead
followed Shaw’s 1887 advice, it might provide more regular employment
opportunity for Shaw who already had a connection to the Gazette.5 Later
in the year, Shaw and Stead would be allies on London’s desperate streets.
On November 13, 1887, socialists, radicals, anarchists, and many of the
working class from East London attempted to converge on Trafalgar Square
to protest the new Crimes Bill for Ireland, introduced and passed by the
recently formed Conservative government, which prohibited free assembly
in Ireland and Britain (Holroyd, I, 184; Gibbs, 481–482).6 Shaw, who had
earlier in the day spoken to protestors, was among the masses marching to
the square. Stead was reportedly also among the protestors and, according
to Shaw, “gave the word ‘To the Square’!” and “To the Square we all went,
therefore, with drums beating and banners waving, in our tens of thou-
sands” (Autobiography, 150). The previous year had seen a smaller, but
somewhat similar demonstration when “thousands of unemployed workers
marched in Trafalgar Square to hear radical speakers accuse employers of
keeping them and their families in chronic poverty and hunger” (Curtis,
54). The 1886 demonstration led to some property looting; in response, the
London conservative press, like The Times, condemned all of the protestors.
Lord Salisbury’s new government shared the sentiment and appointed Sir
Charles Warren, of significant military experience, as commissioner of the
London Metropolitan Police (LMP) (Curtis, 54). So, for the planned mass
demonstration on November 13, 1887, Warren chose to enforce the new
Crimes Bill and “determined to teach the ‘mob’ a lesson” (Curtis, 54). The
LMP baton-charged the protestors to clear the square and neighboring
streets. Shaw “reported that he and others had to beat a rapid retreat from
the police charge” (Gibbs, 129).
The police violence against the mass of working-class East Londoners
and political agitators earned the title of London’s “Bloody Sunday.” The
conservative press, as it had the year previously, rallied to condemn the
protestors, but now it also celebrated Warren and his police. Curtis notes
that the leader in one such paper commented that with the riot “the stakes
were high because this was the battle for control of the metropolis between
‘civilized society’ and the ‘criminal classes,’ and Warren deserved full marks
for upholding the law and defending ‘civilization’” (Curtis, 155). To
counter such press, Stead used The Pall Mall Gazette to attack Warren, his
police, and the government Warren served. The Irish Party MP from
Liverpool, T. P. O’Connor was also outraged by the government’s action
and seized the opportunity to create his own paper to propagandize his
widening opposition to the government. Armed with backers of the Liberal
Party, O’Connor founded a new evening paper two months following
Bloody Sunday, called The Star, which would join leftist-leaning papers
attacking the Conservative government over the November 13 violence
and its general policies—and carry forth Stead’s sensationalized journalism
even further. Of course, the popular success of The Pall Mall Gazette under
Stead was also an incentive to launch a similarly leaning daily.
SHAW, O’CONNOR, AND THE STAR

In his assaults against Salisbury’s government, T. P. O’Connor espoused
liberal and sometimes radical causes, in his view, to bring about a return of
the Liberal Party to power. One of his paper’s causes was the advocacy for
greater enfranchisement of the poor, beyond the 1884 Reform Act—which,
pragmatically would lead to more voters whom O’Connor, no doubt,
believed would vote Liberal. To appeal to such would-be voters and to
those who supported them and fuller enfranchisement, The Star was created
to appeal to London’s lower middle and working classes, as well as those
leaning left. To such an end, O’Connor embraced the sensational, as the
surging popularity of The Pall Mall Gazette during Stead’s Babylon series
was a lesson many newspaper editors and would-be editors had learned.
O’Connor’s goal for returning the Liberal Party was in hopes for a second
Irish Home Rule Bill, which arguably was O’Connor’s main agenda.7 Since
a good portion of the working class in East London were then Irish, Home
Rule, and crusades for more enfranchisement, were potentially popular with
readers. And to solidify the paper’s base further, The Star sold copies for half
a penny, as opposed to The Pall Mall Gazette that cost one penny—the
conservative Times cost three pennies. Armed with such directions and
strategy, The Star “burst onto the scene . . . and soon won over thousands
of plebian readers with its flamboyant style, radical stance and ha-penny
price” (Curtis, 113). The paper, like The Pall Mall Gazette under Stead, was
a “quasi-radical paper [that] served up clever and sardonic editorials, good
gossip, and juicy scandals, as well as special features on crime” (Curtis, 114).
But extraordinarily, while O’Connor’s editorship of The Star would not last
three full years, the paper under his management served as a school of sorts
for a number of future London newspaper editors and journalists.
O’Connor created a free-wheeling front-page editorial column for The
Star titled “WHAT WE THINK,” where he regularly criticized Salisbury’s coer-
cive policies for Ireland and called “for sweeping social and political
reforms” (Curtis, 113).
Shortly before The Star was founded in January 1888, O’Connor’s soon-
to-be subeditor H. W. Massingham wrote to Shaw on behalf of the new
paper: “We have thought of you as a possible contributor and we should be
glad to secure your services for occasional ‘notes’” (qtd. in Havighurst, 21).
Shaw was hired “as a political writer” (Laurence, “Notes,” Collected Letters,
I, 183).8 Most likely the Fabian Shaw was hired, in O’Connor’s thinking, to
attack Salisbury’s government. Shaw, on the other hand, saw the opportu-
nity to regularly voice his political commentary—and receive steady income
from what might prove to be a popular paper allowing for the opportunity
to manufacture a way to provoke real change through journalism, as Stead
had achieved in 1884 and 1885.
However, Shaw’s principles were often at odds with both the two main
conventional parliamentary parties, and so he criticized Liberal as well as
Conservative MPs; both, in his view, were devoid of policies for real social
and economic reform. Since O’Connor and the Irish Party were allied with
the Liberal Party, and the paper backed by Liberal investors, O’Connor
edited Shaw’s Liberal attacks out of his articles, particularly those leveled at
Liberal MP John Morley (Gibbs, 143). As a consequence, Shaw resigned
from The Star on February 9, 1888, after only two weeks on the staff.
A.M. Gibbs notes that in such a short time Shaw had failed to change the
paper’s “political directions from liberal to socialism” (143). But when
Shaw entered the paper’s offices for what was to be the last time on
February 10, he agreed with “O’Connor to write signed articles and send
notes” (Holroyd, I, 215). It was in this capacity that Shaw leant on his Irish
background to pursue one of his unique directions for provoking social
change; that being the countering of the process that led an ignorant public
to be fired up by an increasingly irresponsible and sensationalizing press that
induced general hysteria (particularly amongst the bourgeoisie).
By the spring of 1888, Stead, in an effort to reinvigorate himself and The
Pall Mall Gazette under his editorial leadership, announced in “The Star
[of all papers] that in April he was embarking on a European tour” (Rob-
inson, 242). Sidney Robinson, in his Stead biography Muckraker, writes
that at the time “it was common knowledge that the real purpose of his
[Stead’s] voyage was to journey to Russia in order to meet his political hero,
Tsar Alexander III: a sovereign known to contemporaries and posterity alike
as a brine reactionary who weakly undermined his father’s reformist lean-
ings” (142).9 Stead’s affinity for Alexander was perhaps surprising, espe-
cially given Britain’s 1850s Crimean War and the reputation of tsarist rule,
but Stead was intent on preventing another British war with Russia. To this
end, Stead often praised the Russian tsar and his domestic and foreign
policies, and later did the same with Alexander’s son and heir, Nicholas
II. In response to Stead’s visit to the tsar, Shaw, who in 1880s London knew
a number of “Russian émigré political dissidents,” “wrote some verses for
The Star on Stead’s Russian trip” (Soboleva and Wrenn, 11; Weintraub,
Diaries, I, 388).10 Shaw’s unsigned poem “A Northumberland Street
Ballad” mocked Stead and his Russian cause in The Star on June
26, 1888—The Pall Mall Gazette’s offices were on London’s Northumber-
land Street. The poem referred to Stead as the “Pope of Pall Mall,” who is
told by the despotic tyrannical Alexander III that “Russian goals were all /
A prisoner could desire” and that “Russia’s mission came from Heaven”
(qtd. in Weintraub, “Notes,” Diaries, I, 389). As Robinson points out, it
was indeed curious and “bizarre” that Stead portrayed himself in Russia “as a
semi-official spokesman for the [British] Imperial regime” given he “had
made his name as a protector of the downtrodden” (Robinson, 148–149).11
However, Stead republished his 1888 Russian articles in a book he entitled
The Truth About Russia, which favorably portrayed the tsar. Stead’s long
affinity for Russia and its last tsars would prove highly significant for
Britain’s later foreign policy in the years leading to the Great War. But by
the summer of 1888, Stead was back in London and once again aligned with
the downtrodden—and with Shaw.
In early 1888, Annie Besant, a Fabian (if briefly) and friend of Shaw’s
who had been with him when the police charged the masses on Bloody
Sunday, had founded a small paper in response to the government and its
police called The Link. By June, the paper brought Besant into contact with
young female workers in the Bryant & May matchstick factory in East
London. She discovered that in addition to low wages and sweated labor,
the workers suffered industrial diseases “caused by contact with phospho-
rous” (Gibbs, 129). In writing on the conditions, Besant elaborated by
stating “that the girls are used to carry boxes on their heads until the hair is
rubbed off and the young heads are bald at fifteen years of age” (qtd. in
MacKenzie, 91). Stead joined Besant’s efforts and used The Pall Mall
Gazette to support the workers in a strike. Shaw also joined the effort
supporting the striking workers; the strike momentarily brought some
Fabians into the trade unionist world. Specifically, Shaw helped to transport
money handed out to workers as strike pay, which had been raised by
Stead’s Gazette and The Star (MacKenzie, 91; Weintraub, “Notes,” Diaries,
I, 394). The strike ended after three weeks with improved working condi-
tions, which Besant, Shaw, Stead—and others—must have regarded as a
worthy triumph, representing a good use of the Gazette and Star papers.
Perhaps his efforts on behalf of the Bryant & May workers prompted
reflection on Stead’s part with regard to the shock journalism he had helped
set into motion.12 Supporting the Bryant & May workers could have been
seen as a noble cause by Stead and all involved, which he and The Star’s
O’Connor had promoted without lurid sensationalism. In the August
28, 1888 edition of The Pall Mall Gazette, Stead wrote an editorial on
page 1 with the header “The Blood-Thirst of the Day.” It started with Stead
speculating that a recent accidental death of a balloonist while ballooning
would raise the price for other balloonists to risk death from above, due to
society’s fascination with violent death. It was an article lamenting such
fascination, with Stead revealing a then popular phrase among news jour-
nalists: “a ‘good, first-class bloody murder’, will sell more papers than the
most brilliant article that was ever penned.” Perhaps Stead’s article was self-
reflective, given his contribution to such journalism. Stead noted, “The
craving for sensation, the longing to be thrilled, are the master passions of
this nervous and excitable generation” (Stead, “Blood Thirst,” 1). Stead
himself had run an article four days earlier with the header “The Shocking
Murder in the East End,” which reported on the August 7 murder of a
female prostitute who had been stabbed thirty-nine times (Stead, August
24). Of course, such an article went beyond the mere sensationalizing about
violent death, as it touched on sexual obsession—something that Stead had
flagrantly pioneered in his 1885 Babylon articles. In one such article, Stead
(as the writer) graphically reported on a young woman prostitute in a
brothel being “tied up naked to a nail in the wall . . . flogged by a man
[and] the flesh and blood flowed, while her shrieks for mercy were heard all
over the house” (qtd. in Robinson, 86). Rather than commenting on the
extreme male violence against the woman, Stead insinuated the woman’s
lack of morality, noting she “got more than she bargained for” (qtd. in
Robinson, 86).
Perhaps in response to Stead’s August 28 editorial, Shaw wrote a pseu-
donymous letter, signed “Amelia MacKintosh,” to Stead and The Pall Mall
Gazette, which Stead published on August 31. The letter stated that jour-
nalism improved every August and September:
I never enjoy the papers so much as in August; and I am sure there are plenty
of people who think the same. I hope you won’t mind my saying so; but I feel
certain that a great deal of money is wasted by newspaper proprietors on
literary refinements and cleverness that only bore commonplace people like
yours truly. (“Praise of ‘Silly,’” 9)
But on the same day, in the paper’s fourth edition for the day, Stead ran
an article on page 8 with the header “HORRIBLE MURDER IN EAST LONDON”
(8). London had begun spiraling toward the most sensational journalism it
had ever experienced—certainly in the nineteenth century—which may well
have contributed to the heinous events that were underway in the late
summer and autumn of 1888 in the first city of the British Empire. A
maturing Shaw would seek to contextualize the resultant frenzy and offer
a rational response to the public crisis.
WHITECHAPEL
The Pall Mall Gazette’s last evening edition on August 31, 1888, reporting a
murdered woman discovered in the very early hours of the same day, noted
that a police constable “discovered a woman between thirty-five and forty
years of age lying at the side of the street with her throat cut right open from
ear to ear.” When the woman’s body was quickly “conveyed to the White-
chapel Mortuary, . . . it was found that . . . [the] lower part of [her]
abdomen was completely ripped open, with the bowels protruding. . . . As
the corpse lies in the mortuary it presents a ghastly sight.” It was also noted
that the torn petticoat bore “the name of the Lambeth Workhouse” (“Hor-
rible Murder,” 8). The workhouse connection would lead to the discovery
of the woman’s identity; the name of the economically distressed working-
class woman was Polly Nichols. Her murderer, in a grotesque collaboration
with the London press, would emerge as a menacing, if surprising harbinger
of social awareness, and the murderer’s terror was only beginning to
become public.13
The London papers, as The Pall Mall Gazette, were quick to connect
Nichols’ murder to two earlier brutal summer murders, such as the woman
(identified as Martha Tabram) discovered on August 7 and covered by Stead
on the 24th, who had been repeatedly stabbed in her abdomen, but not
slashed and cut open as with Nichols. The police at the time considered the
two earlier murders, both of street prostitutes, as part of a protection racket
seeking a percentage of earnings (Curtis, 118). And while the two earlier
killings were different from Nichols and the murders that followed, it is
possible that the killer’s psychosis was escalating in ferocity, and that he had
moved from repeated sexual stabbings to sexual mutilations. The Star’s
header for its coverage on Polly Nichols, also in its fourth edition on
August 31, read: “A REVOLTING MURDER / ANOTHER WOMAN FOUND HORRIBLY
MUTILATED IN WHITECHAPEL / GHASTLY CRIMES BY MANIAC” (3). Even the
conservative Times headed its modest coverage with “ANOTHER MURDER IN
WHITECHAPEL” (qtd. in Curtis, 118). The Star’s coverage noted that “No
murder was ever more ferociously and brutally done” and then described
the vicious abdominal slashes and deep cuts, concluding that it was “The
Deed of a maniac” (3). A maniac committing the murder, or murders,
raised fear—as well as fascination—combining the public’s growing obses-
sion with murder and violent death, as promoted by sensationalized
reporting and journalism’s move into reporting sexual deviancy, pioneered
by Stead. O’Connor’s paper was the first to suggest that a monster was
loose in London (Curtis, 118). The Star’s reporter and leader writer who
covered Nichols’ murder, and the similar murders that followed, was Ernest
Parke, a friend of Shaw’s who would enjoy a career as a London newspaper
editor (Curtis, 113; Havighurst, 22).14
Polly Nichols and the subsequent women brutally murdered presumably
by the same person, lived and died in Whitechapel and its adjacent districts,
one of the poorest sections of working-class East London. Nichols, like the
four women killed after her, worked in prostitution to some extent—and all
were soliciting on the nights they were killed, being financially desperate.
Nichols was soliciting during her last hours for “the few pence needed for a
doss” (Curtis, 118).15 The Pall Mall Gazette and The Star, unlike the
conservative press, attempted to see Nichols and the women who followed
her in death, as victims of an economic system—although Stead’s paper, at
times, questioned the victims’ morality. The two papers blamed the lamen-
table Whitechapel living conditions, and the murders, on the Conservative
government’s Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, and the Commissioner of
the London Metropolitan Police, Sir Charles Warren—the two officials the
papers had held responsible for Bloody Sunday the previous November.
And both papers, like all London papers, saw sales increase dramatically as
they linked Nichol’s murder to the two previous murders, in other words
portraying a serial killer—which soon became the definite reality in early
September.
On the morning of September 7, Shaw traveled to Bath to deliver his
paper “Finishing the Transition to Social Democracy” to a section of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science. The Star’s T. P.
O’Connor was present and would soon publicly comment on Shaw’s
presence within British society as a radical. Shaw’s paper would be published
in the following year, as “The Transition to Social Democracy” in Fabian
Essays, which Peter Gahan identifies “as one of the most influential of all
English books on socialism” (Shaw Shadows, 46). Shaw returned to London
on the same day, after his lecture. In the early hours of the next day,
September 8, Annie Chapman was discovered murdered in Whitechapel.
The mutilations inflicted upon Annie Chapman were far more gruesome
and extreme than those of Polly Nichols, and the newspapers seizing on this
monstrous development, became more graphic and shocking in their cov-
erage. Ernest Parke’s leader in The Star on September 8 began with:
“HORROR UPON HORROR / WHITECHAPEL IS PANIC-STRICKEN / AT ANOTHER
FIENDISH CRIME / A FOURTH VICTIM OF THE MANIAC.” The article continued:
“London lies to-day under the spell of a great terror. A nameless repro-
bate—half-beast, half-man—is at large, who is daily gratifying his murder-
ous instincts on the most miserable and defenseless classes of the
community . . . the Whitechapel murderer . . . [is] a murderous maniac.”
Building on his sentiment for the “defenceless classes,” Parke blamed the
police—“The police have not even a clue”—and reminded readers that
Chief Commissioner Warren had ordered his men to use their truncheons
against defenseless workers in 1887 (2). Since Warren seemingly knew so
little about conditions in the East End, “the leader urged Whitechapel
residents to form vigilance committees” (Curtis, 123). No doubt, insinua-
tions that Warren’s Metropolitan Police and its Criminal Investigation
Department (CID) detectives and Scotland Yard were inept (due to class
warfare, such as that evidenced in 1887), played well to East London class
suspicions of the Conservative government.16 But then Parke specifically
alluded to the latest victim, “a poor defenceless walker of streets” who the
murderer de-womanized and de-humanized. He described the murder
scene under the subhead, “THE HEART AND LIVER WERE OVER HER HEAD”
(“Horror Upon Horror”, 2).
In his September 10 reporting, Parke—cognizant of T. P. O’Connor’s
editorial policy in favor of Irish Home Rule—began by attacking landlord-
ism and coercion in Ireland, and then again called for “vigilance commit-
tees” in Whitechapel due to the inept and uncaring police (Curtis, 123).17
In the next day’s edition, O’Connor turned his first page editorial column,
“WHAT WE THINK” into an assault on Home Secretary Matthews for failing to
offer rewards to informants. To increase The Star’s politicizing of the events
(with jabs at Salisbury’s government), and to raise the sensationalism and
shock of its coverage among East London readers, O’Connor suggested
that if the victims had been of the West End, reward money would quickly
have been offered for information: “Working . . . women have been butch-
ered in cold blood in the streets . . . [and] our authorities refuse to take the
most obvious and elementary precautions for ensuring detection” (qtd. in
Curtis, 123). O’Connor also struck at the police gag-order on their inves-
tigations, revealing little or no details to any reporters. Interestingly, The
Star reported in its September 15 edition that for the previous week,
following Chapman’s murder, its daily circulation had soared to 190,000
and claimed its week’s sales were 412,000 copies more than “any other
Evening Paper in London” (“Phenomenal Success,” 2).
Not to be outdone, Stead’s middle-class, but also Liberal Party-leaning
Pall Mall Gazette also took aim in its Annie Chapman murder coverage at
the government’s police, who “had denied thousands of workers the right
to free assembly in Trafalgar Square, and yet were powerless to stop one
man from mutilating four ‘miserable and wretched’ women in a savage
manner” (Curtis, 126). The leader then detailed the vicious throat-cutting
and disemboweling, and theorized, “the Savage of Civilization whom we
are raising by the hundred thousand in our slums is quite capable of bathing
his hands in blood as any Sioux who ever scalped a foe” (qtd. in Curtis,
126).18 On page 8, Stead’s paper described some of the latest savagery:
“heart and abdominal viscera lying by the [body’s] side” (qtd. in Curtis,
126). But expanding the sensationalism of The Pall Mall Gazette and The
Star, the Daily Telegraph reported that “a portion of the flesh . . . [was]
missing” (qtd. in Curtis, 125). The Telegraph suggested, or dictated that all
of London was “thrill[ed] with anger and apprehension . . . [as the mur-
derer] goes to-day undetected about its streets and lanes” (qtd. in Curtis,
125). Even the conservative and aristocratic Times, that defended the police
efforts, worried the killings would continue due to the killer’s “lust for
blood,” hence participating in the sensationalized and shock reporting
(qtd. in Curtis, 124). The Times’ coverage also included interviews with
those who knew or had seen Annie Chapman during the night she was
murdered, which soon became an important feature (Curtis, 124).
During the lull in the Whitechapel murders following Annie Chapman’s
death, the London papers sought to keep the story—and frenzy—alive. On
September 15, The Star was happy to report that the conservative Andover
Standard had launched an attack on The Star and called for a boycott:
“That thug of Journalism and Judas Oracle . . . The Star, the latest of the
gutter efforts of the Metropolitan Radicals in the newspaper line” (“Very
Angry With Us,” 2). This was followed in The Star by reporting on various
suspects pulled in and released by the police, which was continued in the
September 18 edition. But on page 1, O’Connor’s “WHAT WE THINK” was
“glad” the Coroner’s jury on Mary Nichols’ murder chastised the police
and Home Secretary Matthews for failing to offer a reward for information
(1).
The conservative and aristocratic press, such as The Times, also began
devoting much attention to the murders, especially after Annie Chapman’s
murder. In endeavoring to relate their reporting to its conservative and
wealthy base, The Times began focusing on living conditions in White-
chapel, which grew from interviews with those who knew the victims. In
reporting on Chapman’s murder, the Hanbury Street area—where she was
murdered and discovered—is described in the September 12 edition:
The house No. 25, like most of the dwellings on the street, is let out in
tenements direct from the owner, who does not live on the premises, and has
no direct representative therein. The back and front doors are therefore always
left either on the latch or wide open, the tenant of each room looking after the
safety of his own particular premises. The general appearance of the bloody
trail and other circumstances seem to show that the murderer intended to
make his way as rapidly as possible into the street through the house next door
[Chapman was killed in the small yard behind a Hanbury Street tenement
building with access only through the passageway from front to back doors.
The murderer had to pass through the passageway of the tenement, or
through an adjacent tenement, in order to regain the street]. (“The White-
chapel Murder,” September 12, 1888)19
In the next day’s edition, The Times covered the Coroner’s inquest into
Annie Chapman’s murder, and detailed the many occupants in the tene-
ment house on Hanbury Street, where Chapman’s body was discovered in
the yard. The tenants in the various rooms consisted of inhabitants of
numerous working-class occupations, including a Mrs. Hardyman who
“got her living by selling cat’s meat, and also used her one room [dwelling]
for a cat’s meat shop. Her son went out selling the meat” (“The White-
chapel Murder,” September 13, 1888). The same report revealed that there
was only one outside water tap serving the entire tenement, which was in
the yard behind the building where Chapman was found—where the mur-
derer may have washed his hands. Extraordinarily, the living conditions of
the extreme London poor were being revealed by The Times to a class whose
own living conditions were the extreme opposite.
The Times and the bourgeois Daily Telegraph began publishing letters
from readers on the Whitechapel murders and living conditions. Perry
Curtis writes that the Rev. Lord Sidney Godolphin Osbourne wrote “sev-
eral searing letters . . . about the moral and social cesspool from which the
horrors flowed” (Curtis, 246). In a letter on September 18, Osbourne
claimed Whitechapel residents were “a species of human sewage, the very
drainage of the vilest production of ordinary vice” (qtd. in Curtis, 246). At

the same time, a Times leader writer wrote that Whitechapel residents were
“neglected human refuse . . . [which] inevitably breeds crime” (qtd. in
Curtis, 247). This type of thinking had begun to emerge earlier in the
decade. Lydie Carroll, on examining how some wealthy British Victorians
viewed the poor and their living conditions, writes: “emotive speeches
about the moral weaknesses of the poor, about the squalid living conditions
which debased the working classes and decimated them with high mortality
rates.” But much of this concern was with the fear “that this squalor could
spill over the rest of the population and threaten them with disease” and
more (Carroll, 154–155). Such sentiment seemingly was behind the con-
servative press in 1887 when they called on the government and the new
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Warren to “teach the mob a lesson” for
gathering outside East London in Trafalgar Square. However, in 1883, a
Rev. Andres Means authored and published a pamphlet titled The Bitter Cry
of Outcast London, which carefully tried to document the poor’s horrid
living conditions with the aim that something needed to be done for the
poor, not to protect the comfortable classes—the pamphlet’s arguments
had been publicized by The Pall Mall Gazette in 1883 (Schults, 49–50). But
little or nothing had been done by the summer of 1888. The question
arising in September 1888 was, would the new attention being directed on
East London living conditions due to the horrific murders force something
to be done? The leader writer for The Times on September 19, building on
Osbourne’s focus on the sewer-like lives, concluded that the solution for the
poor lay with wealthy West Londoners who could establish and contribute
to charities to clean up Whitechapel (Curtis, 247).
Continuing in a similar slant, another reader’s letter to The Times also
blamed the murders on the “rampant poverty and vice in Whitechapel . . .
[and] wanted to enlist both state and private philanthropy in the campaign
against dirt and depravity.” The same letter concluded that it was fortunate
that Annie Chapman “‘fell in’ with the murderer who was ridding ‘the East
End’ of ‘its vicious inhabitants . . . [if] the typical Annie Chapman’ were
driven out of Whitechapel, she would . . . ‘carry her taint to streets hitherto
untainted’” (Curtis, 246). Such sentiment victimized Annie Chapman
further.
Yet such press was reaching middle- and upper-class readers who, even
hypocritically given their responses to the 1887 Bloody Sunday riot (when
East London conditions were well documented if one cared to inquire, as in
Means’ The Bitter Cry of Outcast London) were suddenly becoming more
aware of East End poverty and living conditions. In other words, more of
the comfortable classes were becoming aware—which undoubtedly was due
to the enormous press coverage that exploded after Annie Chapman’s
murder. Yes, the comfortable classes did not want deprivation in their
own neighborhoods, but a greater awareness within their classes could
facilitate a Fabian philosophy of gradualistic social change—not prompted
by the Fabian Society but by the sensational press coverage following the
murderer. As this was being read around the world—as well as by nearly all
Londoners—this manifestation of middle- and upper-class awareness in
1888 was a defining moment, one that arguably spoke to the modern
metropolis as the breeding ground for a wider cognizance of humanity—
especially of its horrors. Perhaps such awareness and knowledge was even
the fuel to propel what was to emerge as modernism. If early modernism, as
well as revolution, was to arise from the acquired knowledge of oppressive
and stifling social conditions from the sensationalizing press, journalistic
voices were needed to eliminate and dismiss the sensational shock from the
new knowledge to reveal the truth for rational consideration and debate.
Shaw the journalist, who stepped forward in the autumn of 1888, was to
become one of those voices, helping to modernize the world he encoun-
tered. This was to become the best of the New Journalism, which, in turn,
arguably paved the way for modernization and its truth.
CHRISTIANITY, “BLOOD MONEY,” AND SHAW

The details of Annie Chapman’s murder were luridly described in the
London press, but for some the horror seemed to be difficult to grasp—
The Star’s T. P. O’Connor published numerous letters from readers who
asked “Is Christianity a Failure?” The question was likely prompted by the
ongoing murders, the revelations of ghastly mutilations inflicted on Chap-
man described by the Coroner’s inquest, and reports put together by the
sensationalizing press designed to simultaneously invoke horror and scintil-
lation (Laurence, “Notes,” Letters, I, 197).20 Shaw responded to these
published letters by writing his own letter on September 19 to The Star,
recording his return address as “Sky Parlour” and signed “J. C.” The letter
opened with: “Why do you try to put the Whitechapel murders on me? Sir
Charles Warren is quite right not to catch the unfortunate murderer, whose
conviction and punishment would be conducted on my father’s old lines of
an eye for an eye, which I have always consistently repudiated.” On the
recent discussion of Christianity, “J. C.” suggests that the religion has
nothing to do with him and was started by “an aristocrat of the Roman set”
[Saint Paul]—which subtly drew on the socialistic values found in the New
Testament’s recordings of Christ’s teaching that seemingly suggested an
indifference to or an abhorrence of aristocratic wealth. The letter concludes:
“When I see my name mixed up with it [Christianity] in your excellent
paper, I feel as if nails were going into me—and I know what that sensation
is like better than you do” (Letters, I, 197).
On the next day, September 20, Shaw again wrote a pseudonymous
letter to The Star, which was signed “Shendar Brwa” with Shaw’s then
Fitzroy Square address. Recalling Stead’s past campaigns with the Salvation
Army and anticipating Major Barbara, the letter raised the issue of
contrasting views on Christianity amongst social classes—which, of course,
also reflected the great class differences that existed in London that the
Whitechapel murder press was revealing:
Among the poor, for instance, the Salvation Army spreads a vivid conceit
(as your great poet Shakespere [sic] would say) of the horrors of hell and the
ecstasies of heaven, so the uncertainty as to whether the individual is
“saved”—or destined for heaven—or not, is intensely exciting. Here the
hope of heaven makes the people content to bear their deep poverty. . . . I
hope to learn much from this greatly interesting correspondence upon Chris-
tianity in the Star newspaper. (Letters, I, 198–199)
While both letters underlined the futility of the Christianity debate in The
Star’s letters page at the time of the murders, neither seriously nor pur-
posefully addressed the grotesque reactions of the comfortably well-off
classes to the growing knowledge of Whitechapel poverty. T. P. O’Connor
published neither letter. Shaw’s attention was then drawn to Stead, whose
Pall Mall Gazette editorial on September 19 attempted to address the
overwhelming calls of the press for charitable donations from the more
affluent West End to alleviate living conditions in the poorer East End.
But given Stead’s fascination with the gore of the murders and conventional
bourgeois morality, his commentary failed to stir guilty consciences over
Whitechapel living conditions. After all, Stead was proposing that the well-
off should delve deep into their own pockets.
Stead’s September 19 editorial ran with the header “MURDER AS AN
ADVERTISEMENT.” In it, Stead referred to the murderer as a “Scientific
Humanitarian . . . a Sociologist PASTEUR” (qtd. in Curtis, 135). Stead
suggested that the killer was illuminating the horrific conditions in

Whitechapel:
If these cesspools of brutalized humanity were not to become a permanent

source of poisonous miasma, it was necessary something should be done that
would at once rouse public attention, create universal sensation, and compel
even the most apathetic and self-indulgent to admit the first postulate of the
Socialist’s faith, that the luxury and wealth of the West [End] must be
employed to mitigate the squalor and crime of the East [End]. . . . There
must be blood. . . . The warning must be printed in letters of gore. (qtd. in
Curtis, 136)
Curtis notes that Stead’s editorial stipulated that the call to the wealthy
meant the murders had to be more horrible than mere killings, and
acknowledged that the victims “belonged to the dregs of society: they
were all ‘drunken, vicious, miserable wretches’, for whom death was almost
an act of charity” (Curtis, 136). Stead’s editorial conceived the murderer as
shining a spotlight on East London poverty for the rest of the city to see—
yet he still conventionally distanced himself and his readers from the White-
chapel murder victims, as if their baseness excluded them from humanity. It
was a bourgeois view that saw the cause of Whitechapel poverty as a lack of
morality, rather than due to economic alienation and repression. Such a
general perspective of poverty no doubt led to organizations like the Salva-
tion Army tying its relief to religious salvation and, therefore, toward
conventional morality. Condemning the murder victims as immoral only
de-humanized them a second, or third or fourth time.21 But Stead’s sensa-
tional shock journalism, practiced then by all of the London popular press as
the gore sold newspapers, was bourgeoisie through and through. Shaw
responded and reworked Stead’s editorial—as he would rework many a
writer’s work into his own—and he did so now in his own name.
Nearly a year later, on August 31, 1889, Shaw expressed his views on
signed and unsigned leaders in a letter to Tighe Hopkins. These views most
likely extended to press letters given his February 1888 arrangement with
The Star—Shaw stated:
I am, roughly & practically speaking, in favor of signatures, because, though I

am the most conscientious of men, I write more carefully, and with a keen
sense of direct personal responsibility for the soundness of my utterances,
when what I write appears over my signature. Furthermore, I write with
greater freedom when I bear the whole responsibility myself. Again, I like to
get credit for my own brilliancy, because this secures to me personally the full
“rent” of my ability, whereas, when I write anonymously, it is absorbed by the
newspaper proprietor. (Collected Letters, I, 222)
Shaw’s brilliancy emerges in his signed response to the autumn 1888

press-generated frenzy and Stead’s recent editorial.
The backdrop for Shaw’s response on September 24 on page 1 of The
Star was the Parnell Commission that was about to begin in October 1888
and which would last until December 1889. This government commission
investigated possible libel by The Times for running a series of articles in
1887 on “Parnellism and Crime.” The articles, which stemmed from soon-
to-be proven forged letters by Richard Pigott—a former acquaintance of
Shaw’s family in Dublin (specifically in Dalkey, County Dublin)—portrayed
the leader of the Irish Party, Charles Stewart Parnell, and members of the
party as having sanctioned and been involved in violent and murderous
attacks carried out in Dublin and London in the name of Irish indepen-
dence. Specifically, this referred to the Invincibles (a violent Irish nationalist
organization) that assassinated the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Frederick
Cavendish, and the Undersecretary, Thomas Henry Burke, in Dublin’s
Phoenix Park in May 1882, as well as to various dynamite bombings in
Britain by the Fenians (the larger Irish militant nationalist organization to
which the Invincibles belonged). The “Parnellism and Crime” articles had
been run by The Times as part of its use of sensational journalism to
undermine Irish Home Rule, as supported by the Liberal Party, in favor
of The Times’ conservative reader base. The Star’s editor, T. P. O’Connor,
of course, had great interest in the Parnell Commission, being an Irish
Party MP.
O’Connor used the Whitechapel murders, not only to sell newspapers,
but also to attack the Conservative government again and again in print,
through its Home Secretary Matthews and its London Metropolitan Police
Commissioner Warren. Sympathetic and scared working-class readers were
easily riled up, as they felt victimized not only by the Whitechapel murderer,
but also by a seemingly uncaring government and its incompetent police. It
would be two years before Shaw would address Parnell in The Star, and
O’Connor was most likely disappointed that Shaw had not joined his call for
Home Rule, except for a satirical poem on anti-Home Rule (Tory) Chief
Secretary for Ireland, Arthur Balfour, “A Balfour Ballad,” in January 1888.
Still, O’Connor published Shaw’s masterful response to the bourgeois and
aristocratic public frenzy stirred by the autumn 1888 sensational murder

press.22
Shaw’s “Blood Money to Whitechapel” appeared on page 1 of The Star’s
September 24, 1888 edition, following O’Connor’s “WHAT WE THINK”
editorial, which served as an introduction to Shaw and Shaw’s response to
the frenzy. O’Connor began his column by recalling his attendance at the
British Association for the Advancement of Science in Bath on September
7, when Shaw presented his paper “Finishing the Transition to Social
Democracy.” O’Connor wrote:
A tall thin man, with a very pale and very gentle face, read a paper which calmly
denounced as robbers some of the men the world is accustomed to regard as
ornaments of society, the patterns of morality, and the pillars of the church.
This was Mr. G EORGE B ERNARD S HAW. The whole thing was done, not with
the savagery of a wild and illiterate controversialist, but with the light touch,
the deadly playfulness, and the rapier thrusts of a cultivated and thoughtful
man. Mr. S HAW is as yet little known to the general world, but he is a power, as
he deserves to be, among the militant Radicals of the metropolis.
O’Connor then moved to Shaw’s leader and attempted to contextualize

Shaw’s references to the 1887 Trafalgar Square riots, sounding as if he is
describing Jonathan Swift’s 1720s turn at journalism that included “A
Modest Proposal”—perhaps recognizing the ascent of a new Irish satirist:
We publish a letter to-day from Mr. S HAW.23 It is on the hideous and squalid
tragedies which, occurring in the East, have stirred up the West-end to
unusual and unaccustomed interest in the fate of the poor and the disinherited
of the nation. Mr. S HAW writes what will be considered violence by many, if
not by most of our readers, and his proposals are far in advance of those which
even some of our most advanced Radicals will be disposed to adopt. They are
certainly in advance of any measures that we ourselves are ready to recom-
mend. But we willingly give Mr. S HAW the opportunity of ventilating his ideas;
first, because we are in favour of free discussion; and secondly, because though
we may not accept his remedies, we sympathize largely with the protest he
makes against the fashion in which some of our contemporaries have treated
the Whitechapel murders. His revolt against the gush and the cant which are
now appearing in certain aristocratic journals, which are now calling upon the
West to do its duty to the East, are the very journals, as Mr. S HAW points out,
which but a few months ago [November 1887] were applauding
[Commissioner] Sir C HARLES W ARREN . . . . In the House of Commons, and

still more in the drawing-rooms of the West-end, gilded youths and Primrose
matrons were pluming their feathers on the spirited way in which the mob had
been taught to conduct itself; and the triumphant reply of [Home Secretary]
Mr. M ATTHEWS in the House of Commons, and the splendid majority . . . all
the reactionaries were congratulating themselves on the excellent results of a
policy of coercion in London, as well as in Ireland. On these gratulations [sic]
come four hideous and squalid tragedies, and at once the same society, that
was exultant with class triumph, has grown pale with class terror, and follows
with babbling, childish unctuous proposals—as much a remedy for the state of
things revealed as the buns of a French lady for the starvation of the French
revolutionaries. We may ask why it required these murders to call attention to
the state of the poor at all? The deaths of these unhappy women certainly call
aloud for vengeance, and the officials through whose incompetence such
things are possible, will be called by-and-by to a heavy account. But death,
sudden, swift, possibly painless—and especially to those who have tried the
game of life and have lost honour, self-respect, hope, everything—is infinitely
less of a tragedy than the daily struggle for work that can’t be got; for food
that can’t be earned.24 (“What We Think,” September 24, 1888, 1)
Despite O’Connor’s professed sympathy for East Londoners, he cannot

resist expressing a bourgeois morality regarding the murdered Whitechapel
women based on their prostituion for survival, as well as maintaining some
distance between himself and The Star, and the socialist Shaw. After ending
with a call for greater enfranchisement for the poor, O’Connor states that
until such is achieved, “We shall have to put up with such canting and
shallow philosophy as that which Mr. S HAW so triumphantly assails in our
columns to-day” (“What We Think,” September 24, 1888, 1).25 The truth,
on September 24, 1888 from Shaw, was a superb response to the cant and
shallow philosophy from papers like The Times, which despite its aristocratic
airs, was not above libeling Parnell and those in opposition to its politics
through its own dabbling in sensational journalism. But due to Shaw’s equal
dissatisfaction with the Liberal Party, Shaw resisted O’Connor’s tendency
to use the murders mostly as a way to attack the Conservatives. To Shaw,
the situation was more an issue of class, not of the two main political parties.
After all, in reporting on the Whitechapel murders, the Liberal Party-
leaning Pall Mall Gazette and The Star, under Stead and O’Connor, led
the way with sensationalizing gore-soaked coverage.
Shaw began his Whitechapel essay by re-working W. T. Stead’s
September 19 editorial in which he (Stead) suggested the murderer was a
sociologist endeavoring to draw public, namely West London attention to

the poverty of Whitechapel—as if a harbinger of social awareness. Shaw
takes the harbinger idea further in a cold, reasoned but almost darkly
comedic tone as he assumes a detached writing style that would become
characteristic of his responses to the comfortable classes’ sensationalizing
press-generated hysteria. The style reflected the emerging brilliance of
Shaw’s journalism, which would later find its way into his post-1890 literary
canon:
SIR.—Will you allow me to make a comment on the success of the Whitechapel

murderer in calling attention for a moment to the social question? Less than a
year ago the West-end press, headed by the St. James’s Gazette, The Times, and
the Saturday Review, were literally clamouring for the blood of the people—
hounding on Sir Charles Warren to thrash and muzzle the scum who dared to
complain that they were starving—heaping insult and reckless calumny on
those who interceded for the victims—applauding to the skies the open class
bias of those magistrates and judges who zealously did their very worst in the
criminal proceedings which followed—behaving, in short as the proprietary
class always does behave when the workers throw it into a frenzy of terror by
venturing to show their teeth. Quite lost on these journals and their patrons
were indignant remonstrances, argument, speeches, and sacrifices, appeals to
history, philosophy, biology, economics, and statistics; references to the
reports of inspectors, registrar generals, city missionaries, Parliamentary com-
missions, and newspapers; collections of evidence by the five senses at every
turn; and house-to-house investigations into the condition of the unem-
ployed, all unanswered and unanswerable, and all pointing the same way.26
The Saturday Review was still frankly for hanging the appellants; and The
Times denounced them as “pests of society.” This was still the tone of the class
Press as lately as the strike of the Bryant and May girls. Now all is changed.
Private enterprise has succeeded where Socialism failed. Whilst we conven-
tional Social Democrats were wasting our time on education, agitation, and
organization, some independent genius has taken the matter in hand, and by
simply murdering and disembowelling four women, converted the proprietary
press to an inept sort of communism.
Then Shaw finally alluded to the Irish question, if only to the lesson to be
learned by the militant Irish nationalist agitators, as well by anarchists:
The moral is a pretty one, and the Insurrectionists, the Dynamitards, the
Invincibles, and the extreme left of the Anarchist party will not be slow to
draw it.27 “Humanity, political science, economics, and religion,” they will
say, “are all rot; the one argument that touches your lady and gentleman is the
knife.” That is so pleasant for the party of Hope and Perseverance in their
toughening struggle with the party of Desperation and Death!28
However, these things have to be faced. If the line to be taken is that

suggested by the converted West-end papers—if the people are still to yield
up their wealth to the Clanricarde class, and get what they can back as charity
through Lady Bountiful, then the policy for the people is plainly a policy of
terror.29 Every gaol blown up, every window broken, every shop looted, every
corpse found disembowelled, means another £10 note for “ransom.” The
riots of 1886 brought in £78,000 and a People’s Palace; it remains to be seen
how much these murders may prove worth to the East-end in panem et
circenses.30 Indeed, if the habits of duchesses only admitted of their being
decoyed into Whitechapel back-yards, a single experiment in slaughterhouse
anatomy on an aristocratic victim might fetch in a round half million and save
the necessity of sacrificing four women of the people.31 Such is the stark-
naked reality of these abominable bastard Utopias of genteel charity, in which
the poor are first to be robbed and then pauperised by way of compensation,
in order that the rich man may combine the idle luxury of the protected thief
with the unctuous self-satisfaction of the pious philanthropist.
After expressing the hypocrisy of the bourgeois and aristocratic class and
press, and its promoted charities, Shaw offered a real plan to deal with
Whitechapel poverty—the only rational plan offered that endeavored to
undermine the poverty during the press-inspired frenzy.
The proper way to recover the rents of London for the people of London is
not by charity, which is one of the worst curses of poverty, but by the
municipal rate collector, who will no doubt make it sufficiently clear to the
monopolists of ground value that he is not merely taking round the hat, and
that the State is ready to enforce his demand, if need be. And the money thus
obtained must be used by the municipality as the capital of productive
industries for the better employment of the poor. I submit that this is at
least a less disgusting and immoral method of relieving the East-end than the
gush of bazaars and blood money which has suggested itself from the West-
end point of view.—Yours, &c., G. BERNARD SHAW. (“Blood-Money,” 1)
Shaw’s ability to remain detached from the frenzy was undoubtedly

connected to his commitment to the truth, but his ability to see the truth
when most others did not or could not, was to be cultivated and developed
for decades. His detachment here, of course, was in his ability not to be
caught up in the murder press-riled hysteria, and in resisting respectable

bourgeois moralizing over the Whitechapel victims. In such detachment
Shaw was able to offer a rational plan to address the inhumane poverty.
There was danger and hypocrisy in suggesting that the murderer was
responsible for West End blood money for Whitechapel—the focus needed
to be on formulating and implementing a social and economic plan to
alleviate poverty in the area, not charity. Employing the phrase “less dis-
gusting and immoral” to characterize his plan, in comparison to the “gush
of bazaars and blood money” from charities in the West End, emphasizes
the additional social degradation inflicted upon the victims of the gruesome
and horrific murders. The murders were heinous in themselves, but for
Shaw, the respectable West End reaction of the “protected” thieves as
self-fashioned philanthropists was worse. It was clear hypocrisy to the
greatest degree if one prescribed to Shaw’s belief that the wealthy profited
through the poor, who clearly could ill afford to be so used living as they
already were in inhumane squalor. However, the Whitechapel frenzy with
its generated West End charities would only grow worse. Six days after
Shaw’s response was published, the Whitechapel murderer struck again, this
time killing two women in one night: Catherine Eddowes and Elizabeth
Stride.
DOUBLE KILLINGS, DOUBLE SENSATIONS

In the early hours of September 30, 1888, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine
Eddowes were discovered. Stride’s throat had been severely cut as with
earlier victims, but that was all. The mutilations inflicted on Eddowes had
escalated from those inflicted on Annie Chapman earlier in the month.32
Perhaps the murderer had been interrupted with Stride, moved on and then
located Eddowes nearby. Shortly after discovering Eddowes’ body, a sec-
tion of her apron—which had been “cut away”—was located by a police
constable in Goulston Street, about a “third of a mile” from where Eddowes
had been found and deeper into Whitechapel, suggesting that the murderer
was from the district. The apron section was bloody and appeared as if the
murderer had stopped and used it to wipe the blood from his knife
(Rumbelow, 67).33 On a wall near the apron section was some graffiti
seemingly related to the murders and most likely written by the murderer.
When this and the apron were reported, Commissioner Warren went to the
scene himself and concluded that since the graffiti might stir up further anti-
Jewish sentiment—as newspapers, including The Star, had earlier incorrectly
implicated a Jewish suspect—Warren ordered the graffiti to be erased before

a photographer could arrive to record it (Rumbelow, 67–68).34 Perhaps
valuable evidence had been destroyed.
But at this time, a letter dated September 25 and a bloodstained postcard
post-marked October 1 were received at the Central News Agency—a news
gathering agency that wrote copy sold to numerous papers like an early
version of the modern wire service. Both the letter and card were in similar
handwriting and signed “Jack the Ripper” (Curtis, 140–141). Some senior
police officers believed these had been authored by a journalist in an effort
to stir up more sensation (Curtis, 141). But then another letter was sent to
George Lusk, the co-founder of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, in a
bloodstained box with half of a kidney. The letter claimed that the writer,
the murderer, had taken the kidney from one of his recent victims and ate
the other half. Since one of Catherine Eddowes’ kidneys was missing from
her corpse, the letter seemed likely to be from the murderer. A physician
confirmed that the kidney section was human and from “an alcoholic [. . .]
around forty-five, who had died about the same time as Eddowes” (Curtis,
178).35 Given such likely authentication, it now appeared that the new
sensationalizing journalism had not only stirred up West End hypocritical
frenzy, but had also led to interaction with, and perhaps was even encour-
aging, the murderer now sensationally known as Jack the Ripper. The letter
Lusk received began with “From Hell” and was signed “Catch me if you
can—Mr. Lusk” (Curtis, 177).
The London press, from The Times to The Star, made much of the
double murder, the Jack the Ripper correspondence, and the Lusk letter.
The press stirred more frenzy by furthering the revelations of how the poor
of East London lived—and died. The Illustrated London News on October
13 ran numerous sketches of Whitechapel conditions, including one titled
“OUTCASTS SLEEPING IN SHEDS IN WHITECHAPEL” that depicted women
sleeping in a shed that appeared to be a dilapidated animal shelter (1).
Such copy helped further spread the social hypocrisy Shaw had found in
the calls for West End charity for Whitechapel as another murder lull lasted
into November.
The murderer did not strike again until the early hours of November
9, when Irish immigrant Mary Jane Kelly was gruesomely killed, de-sexed
and de-humanized—or de-humaned—inside the tiny impoverished room
she rented in Miller’s Court, an alleyway off one of East London’s most
poverty-riddled streets, Dorset Street in Spitalfields, immediately adjacent
to Whitechapel. Being the only Ripper murder committed indoors, which
allowed the killer more time, the mutilations were by far the worst.36 And
the defensive wounds on Mary Kelly’s hands, and a clenched fist, suggested
she struggled—rather than having her throat cut from behind as may have
been the case with some of the earlier victims. The escalation in the ferocity
of the killing was considered, perhaps, to be too dangerous for the press to
cover fully. Scotland Yard and CID’s gag order on their detectives was
increased in an effort, Curtis asserts, “to prevent the spread of wild rumors”
regarding organs missing from Kelly’s body (Curtis, 187). During the
inquest, the coroner interrupted the medical testimony before any specifics
were stated regarding the mutilations. The inquest ended without consid-
ering the mutilations—obviously to prevent further press coverage.
On November 12 (the day before Kelly’s murder) The Star hailed
Commissioner Warren’s resignation, regarding it as poetic justice “for
Trafalgar Square, for coercion in Ireland and London,” but lamented that
East London poverty and misery would continue (qtd. in Curtis, 197).37
The Star’s writer, most likely Shaw’s friend Ernest Parke, also lamented that
Britain “had no Zola to capture the plight of the near-starving, joyless, and
hopeless unfortunates struggling to survive” (qtd. in Curtis, 197). Interest-
ingly, ten days earlier the paper had published a pseudonymous letter by
Shaw (signed as “A Novelist”) criticizing the government for prosecuting
and convicting Henry Vizetelly for obscenity for having published a trans-
lation of Emile Zola’s La Terre (Laurence and Rambeau, 12).
In his letter to The Star on behalf of Vizetelly, Shaw wrote that the real
issue was not the truth of society as expressed by Zola—“Nobody has
ventured to pretend that what M. Zola describes does not exist”—but
rather whether, “the British Pharisee’s view is to be followed, which is
that it is M. Zola’s duty to hide the evil and pretend that no such thing
[. . . or] M. Zola’s own view that it is his duty to drag it into the light and
have it seen to” (“The Vizetelly Prosecution,” 12). The prosecution of the
translator Vizetelly was the result of pressure from the National Vigilance
Association, of which Stead was a prominent member. Stead had used The
Pall Mall Gazette to publicly condemn Vizetelly—once again influencing
levels of the government. The National Vigilance Association perceived
what it considered salacious literature propagating not only immorality,
but also being indicative of the immorality of areas such as Whitechapel,
and even contributing to the murders themselves. There was no consider-
ation of the fact that most Whitechapel residents were probably not readers
of Zola, nor any realization that Stead’s brand of journalism did more to
publicize horridly brutal sexuality, as in the Whitechapel murders, than
Zola’s literature. Prosecuting the case against Vizetelly in court was the
future Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith.38 Undoubtedly to Shaw,
the government’s prosecution of Vizetelly and Stead’s persecution of the
same, must have appeared extremely petty, even ridiculous in the context of
the Whitechapel murders and the Parnell Commission. But the Whitechapel
public hysteria now included bourgeois morality that raged against what it
perceived as sexually corrupting literature, whether in Zola’s vein or not.39
Two decades later, Shaw would allude to Zola within the 1888 context,
not implying that Zola was responding to the moralists, but rather
responding to the public’s fascination with sensational reporting. Shaw
asserted in his preface “From Moliere to Brieux,” for Three Plays by Brieux,
that Zola borrowed from the Whitechapel murders for his novel La Bête
Humaine—not to inspire sexualized murders but instead to relate his fiction
to publics shaped by the sensationalizing press that luridly promoted inter-
est in grotesque violence (xi–xii).
Despite The Star’s speculation on the absence of a Zola in 1888 Britain,
Queen Victoria, at Balmoral, telegraphed Prime Minister Lord Salisbury on
learning of Mary Kelly’s murder (most likely from the sensationalizing
reports in The Times) and demanded “some very decisive action” (qtd. in
Curtis, 193). Presumably she was referring to arresting the murderer rather
than addressing East London’s poverty. Salisbury’s cabinet decided to offer
a pardon to anyone, apart from the murderer, who came forward with
evidence (Curtis, 325). No one came forward and Kelly’s murder (the
coverage of which raised The Star’s circulation to a peak of 300,000 copies
per day), seemingly was the last Whitechapel Ripper murder. Press coverage
of the murders began to slowly fade as no suspect was arrested and no
further victims were discovered, but the sensationalizing shock journalism
that had exploited the murders had changed all Londoners and their
newspapers.
On December 27, 1888 Shaw wrote a pseudonymous letter to The Star,
signed “William Watkins Smyth,” and titled “The Abolition of Christmas.”
He began by relating a train journey on Christmas Eve—the man sitting
next to him was reading the London Conservative Party-leaning Standard
newspaper, a paper that “took a completely pro-Warren point of view”
when Warren resigned as Police Commissioner (Schults, 246). Shaw’s
Standard reader exclaimed:
“I don’t know what people are coming to. Four more murders this morning.”
Instantly the moody holiday-makers roused themselves. “Whitechapel?” was
the question that came from them all with a common impulse. “No,” said the
Standard-bearer, “all in the country except the one at Limehouse”
[an impoverished London section in 1888 with many Chinese emigrants
and numerous opium dens].
Everybody turned away disappointed. “Lime’us!” said one man disparagingly,

“that’s the same old ‘un.” Our informant insisted on the fact that the murders
were very horrible, and that the victim in one case was a very old man. But
nobody vouchsafed further attention to his provincial horrors until I helped
him out by politely asking—with reference to the old man—“How?” “Sledge-
hammer over the face” was the reply. “Sledgin’ her over the face,” the
Lime’us man, with a flash of interest, “What’s that?” “Sledge-hammer, sir,
sledge-hammer. Knocked the unfortunate man’s face in.” “Oh,” said the
other, deeply disillusioned, as he relapsed into listless silence. I quitted this
festive company at the next station, and went about my business. (“Aboli-
tion,” 13–14)
Astutely, Shaw satirized the sexual sensationalism of bloody brutal vio-

lence that the Whitechapel murder frenzy had produced in most Londoners
(that was hardly moral), which was now bleeding into the supposedly festive
Christmas season. Of course, how could London really be festive after
collectively experiencing and even relishing the sensational Whitechapel
frenzy, hysteria, and the brutally murdered women? Christmas cards with
meaningless slogans like “peace on earth” and the giving and receiving of
Christmas boxes amongst acquaintances and relatives must have seemed
empty gestures. This was perhaps Shaw’s point in recommending the
abolition of Christmas as he neared the end of his letter: “Mr. Star Editor,
I ask you, on your honour, are you any the better for Christmas?” (14).
The lingering effects of the Whitechapel frenzy, the flames of which were
so well fanned by the sensational London press of all classes and which
produced the charitable hypocrisy amongst the well off, remained for
Londoners long after the killings.40 The upper-class hypocrisy that Shaw
had attacked in “Blood Money to Whitechapel” found its way into his first
play, Widowers’ Houses in 1892. In effect, his journalism was influencing, or
leading him, in the writing of his first dramatic offering. While West
Londoners called for charity toward Whitechapel to improve housing for
the poor, and carried through on some of their philanthropy, Shaw the
journalist knew charity was but a temporary fix for a few, and the new
dramatist then portrayed the East London housing crisis from the West
End’s perspective. While the play’s aristocratic character Trench is appalled
to learn his yearly income is based on the slums Sartorius manages, he is

unable to respond effectively—for him, his lifestyle takes precedence over
that of the slum-dwellers. This attitude is exactly the same as displayed by
the West Enders in 1887 and again in 1888—they did not want the poor
infringing on their lives and lifestyles, and were determined to enjoy their
profits and wealth, no matter where they came from. Their attitude was
much about keeping the poor at bay and underfoot, and the murders had
brought the poor into their London newspapers, Conservative and Liberal.
The newspaper coverage of the Whitechapel murders, and Shaw’s con-
tinued monitoring of such, further worked its way into Widowers’ Houses
and helped to prepare some Londoners for Shaw’s first play. The exceed-
ingly large press coverage of the coroner’s inquest, brief as it was, on Mary
Kelly’s murder included the testimony of Thomas Bowyer. Bowyer had
discovered Mary’s body. He was the rent collector who worked for Kelly’s
landlord, John McCarthy—just as Shaw’s character Lickcheese was the rent
collector for the slums Sartorius managed with well-to-do investors like
Trent. At 10.30 a.m. on November 9, 1888, Bowyer arrived at Kelly’s
squalid room in Miller’s Court to collect the twenty-nine shillings she
owed in back rent, or evict her (Curtis, 22, 186, 195). Bowyer’s testimony
made it clear as to why Kelly was soliciting despite such well-known and
extreme danger. The coverage of Bowyer’s testimony, inadvertently or not,
placed blame for Kelly’s desperation—which got her killed—with the slum-
lord McCarthy. Middle-class readers were given access to the daily struggle
for survival of Kelly and her social class, with McCarthy and Bowyer fully
anticipating the roles of slumlord Sartorius and Lickcheese in Widowers’
Houses. To further this presence, The Pall Mall Gazette published a small
notation on the scheduling of Kelly’s funeral on November 19, together
with copy on McCarthy’s complaint “about his loss of income because the
police were still guarding the entrance to Miller’s Court” and Kelly’s
murder room, preventing him from renting the squalid and now bloody
room (Curtis, 199–200). Little would change in the four years following
the murders as the “screwing, and bullying, and threatening” of slum-
dwellers was still prevalent as Shaw’s play testified (Widowers’ Houses, 40).
The sensationalized fascination that had led to bourgeois charity in 1888
had achieved little by 1892, when Shaw’s play charged that nothing had
changed with the capitalist, but supposedly moral, class.
In the year following the premier of Widowers’ Houses, Shaw wrote his
prostitution play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, also, arguably, a product of his
journalistic experience over the previous eight years. In Act II, Shaw
succinctly explained, as if in an effort to undermine all of the sensationaliz-

ing press’ bourgeois moralizing about prostitutes (from Stead’s 1885 Bab-
ylon articles through the 1888 Whitechapel murder press), why anyone
would turn to prostitution. It was a much needed explanation presented in a
play that owes much to Shaw’s then understanding of the sensationalizing
press that propagandized archaic values that hampered clear thinking about
the important issues, and left society’s ills unchecked. The play also owes its
principals to Shaw’s “Blood-Money to Whitechapel,” and other, early
journalism that presented articles based on truth rather than lurid sensa-
tionalism. In the true style of a well-educated middle-class young woman,
Vivie tells her mother, Kitty Warren (Mrs. Warren): “Everyone has some
choice mother. The poorest girl alive may not be able to choose between
being Queen of England or Principal of Newnham; but she can choose
between ragpicking and flowerselling” (48). Kitty Warren tells Vivie of her
childhood in her mother’s fried-fish shop near the Royal Mint in Tower
Hill, London. She relates how her half-sisters were “respectable” daughters,
and asks:
Well, what did they get by their respectability? I’ll tell you. One of them
worked in a white lead factory twelve hours a day for nine shillings a week until
she died of lead poisoning. She only expected to get her hands a little
paralyzed [from the lead poisoning]; but she died. The other was always
held up to us [Kitty Warren and her sister Liz] as a model because she married
a Government labourer in the Deptford victualing yard, and kept his room
and the three children neat and tidy on eighteen shillings a week—until he
took to drink. That was worth being respectable for, wasn’t it? (49–50)
After Liz ran away from the “church school” she and Kitty attended, “the
clergyman was always warning me that Lizzie’d end up jumping off Water-
loo Bridge . . . . I was more afraid of the white lead factory than I was the
river; and so would you have been in my place” (50).
The white lead factory, with its industrial dangers, was drawn in part from
William Booth’s 1890 Darkest England and the Way Out, in which it is
pointed out that some women could earn more as a prostitute than in an
industrial factory, with both being short-lived occupations.41 But this was
all accented for Shaw by the Bryant & May matchstick factory where he
helped workers during their July 1888 strike—which had been over wages
and the unsafe industrial dangers due to handling phosphorous in the
factory.42 Shaw very clearly depicted in his play the limited choices that
were open to a working-class young woman—dangerous factory work

leading to an early death, Kitty Warren’s early work, or prostitution. Warren
tells of having worked before prostitution as a scullery maid in a temperance
restaurant and then at a bar in Waterloo Station: “fourteen hours a day
serving drinks and washing glasses for four shillings a week and my board”
(50). But unlike the Whitechapel murder victims, who were all middle-aged
and worn-out by poverty and previous work experiences—except for Mary
Kelly who was in her twenties—the prostitution that Liz offers Kitty is in a
wealthy established brothel in Brussels: “a much better place for a woman to
be in than the factory where Annie Jane got poisoned. None of our girls
were ever treated as I was treated in the scullery of that temperance place, or
at the Waterloo bar, or at home. Would you have had me stay in them and
become a worn out old drudge before I was forty?” (51). Of which the
question could have been continued, “and end with an early death walking
the streets in Whitechapel?” (51).
Regardless of the financial success of Liz and Kitty Warren through
prostitution, Shaw addresses in the above dialogue between Kitty and
Vivie why a woman turned to prostitution. Despite what Vivie had implied
earlier—and what most of the 1888 Whitechapel murder press had insinu-
ated—a person only turned to prostitution because of economics, not
because of a lack of morality. This was very clearly reflected as fact, despite
its inclusion to sensationalize events for bourgeois readers in the press
reports on why the Ripper victims had been soliciting when murdered.
And in his preface to the play, Shaw wrote that the play’s intent was “to
draw attention to the truth that prostitution is caused, not by female
depravity and male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying,
undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of
them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together”
(120). Shaw chose to voice his commentary on prostitution in Mrs. Warren’s
Profession, including the profound testaments in the play’s Act IV on wealth
based on using and profiting from the poor—whether factory employees or
those in prostitution—rather than through his journalism. Perhaps he felt
the play form was freer than journalism in 1893. However, the Lord
Chamberlain’s Office in Britain, and censorship elsewhere, delayed the
play’s much needed commentary.43
Some of that play commentary may have been reflected in the characters’
names, although it is probably a coincidence that Kitty Warren’s half-sister
(who died young) carried two names belonging to the last Ripper victim,
Mary Kelly—“Mary Jane (or Mary Ann) Kelly,”—and victim Elizabeth
Stride was sometimes referred to as Liz, the name of Kitty Warren’s full
sister (Curtis, 22; 20). Of course, the use of such names may merely reflect
their commonness. But Kitty Warren’s surname may well have been
borrowed by Shaw, in a Shavian jest for his prostitution play, from Com-
missioner Sir Charles Warren. As far as Shaw was concerned, Warren had
unleashed police baton attacks on working-class protestors and socialist
agitators in 1887, and in 1888 had failed to apprehend—and may have
destroyed evidence that might have led to the apprehension of—the White-
chapel murderer of prostitutes. The impulse for the play derived from
Shaw’s journalistic considerations of the press’ hypocrisy going back to
1885, which was dominated by Stead’s Babylon series and 1888
Whitechapel.
The lingering effects of the Whitechapel murder period would remain in
London for years, if not decades and beyond. The press had changed and
salivated for sensations, as did the public it readily seduced into hysteria.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, first introduced in late 1887,
gained a lasting popularity after the Ripper murders as a consulting detective
solving cases the police could not. Yet Conan Doyle never wrote a Holmes
case as sordid as the Whitechapel murders, mostly setting his stories in
London’s West End or on country estates. The Holmes stories became
famously associated with The Strand magazine that favored detective
stories, edited by George Newnes, a former associate of Stead’s. The
combination of lust and blood from the Ripper press arguably led to that
1897 gothic novel of blood and sexual obsession, Dracula, by Shaw’s fellow
Dublin-born Londoner Bram Stoker and which echoed a September
10, 1888 Daily Telegraph leader that reported the murderous Whitechapel
monster to be a “vampire” (qtd. in Curtis, 125). And the language from the
murders’ press even found its way into Shaw’s theater criticism during the
1890s for The Saturday Review, a paper Shaw had numbered among those
that had applauded Warren’s brutal police force on Bloody Sunday in 1887
in “Blood Money to Whitechapel”.44 In his September 26, 1896 review of
Henry Irving’s production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Shaw took excep-
tion to Irving’s alterations of Shakespeare’s scripts to accent his, Irving’s,
perceived talents: “He [Irving] does not merely cut plays: he disembowels
them” (“Blaming the Bard,” 198). A searing review indeed, amid a society
and culture that still remembered the 1888 autumn.
An echo from the long memory of that autumn is even in Shaw’s 1914
popular Pygmalion, a play that is tied to 1880s London as it borrowed the
purchasing of Eliza from Stead’s 1885 staged trick of purchasing a young
girl for his child prostitution series. The echo from the autumn of terror
rings out in Act III amid Mrs. Higgins’ Chelsea flat after a practiced Eliza
announces that she must leave. When the infatuated Freddy asks Eliza if she
was planning to walk across the park, she responds, famously: “Walk! Not
bloody likely” (253). Shaw’s stage direction that immediately follows is
“Sensation” (253). Indeed the word “bloody,” which had been in use
from at least the eighteenth century but which was no doubt enhanced by
the gory Ripper press coverage, not only spoke in the play of Eliza’s London
poverty background among those playing at respectability, it indeed caused
a “sensation” during the play’s London premier. Moments later in the
action, Shaw has Clara repeat the word as she attempts to emulate Eliza’s
blurted urban-poverty slang after the latter’s exit: “Such bloody nonsense”
(254). Not only had Shaw used a word with its refreshed 1888 connotations
to reveal a glimpse of Eliza’s background, he subtly portrayed the fascina-
tion of the respectable with the poor (as prompted by the 1888 sensation-
alizing press that failed to generate effective plans to address poverty) which
is also voiced in the play by Freddy’s affinity for Eliza. In addition, in 1914,
“bloody” in Pygmalion provided a sensation for the audiences of Shaw’s
most commercially popular play, just as the blood of the proletariat in the
press had done so for respectable classes in 1888. For those who had lived
through the Whitechapel horror, the bloody terror was long remembered.
The sensationalizing press that reached unprecedented heights during
the Whitechapel autumn had been unleashed, and the Western world began
marching toward modernization. While, on the one hand, the press moved
into a new age with an ability to capture thousands of new readers thanks to
greater public literacy and a demand and obsession for quick scintillating
daily news, on the other it frequently retained the worst lingering strands
from previous decades, such as excessive morality, romanticizing, and mil-
itarism—the latter to be made deadly through this modernization process.
And as he responded to the Whitechapel press-created frenzy, Shaw con-
tinued to refine and develop his journalistic efforts to critically counter the
popular press’ increasing muddling of the truth. Shaw remained committed
to provoking rational thought over mindless press titillations. In this pro-
cess, through the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the twen-
tieth, Shaw consistently embodied T. P. O’Connor’s conviction that Shaw
was a “power.” As he emerged as an important dramatist and well-known
public intellectual, Shaw furthered his journalism as needed. Prompted by
the need to respond to the sensationalizing efforts of W. T. Stead and those
Stead inspired, Shaw would evolve over the next three decades to produce
arguably one of the most important examples of Western modern journal-

ism. Along the way, the developing Shaw responded to an assortment of
press manufactured frenzies, such as the insidious pro-Liberal Party press
fury over the leader of the Irish Party, Charles Stewart Parnell, that
expanded the bourgeois morality the press had begun championing during
the Whitechapel murders. Stead, of course, found ways to sensationalize
that morality into hot leaders that sold newspapers at the expense of
Parnell—and Ireland—and rational debate. Shaw answered.
NOTES
1. The supplement appeared in the November 14, 1914 edition of New
Statesman.
2. Margot Gayle, in Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism,
and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars, suggests that the journalism
Stead developed was scandalmongering, and the form had first
emerged in Dublin in 1883–1884 as a political response by the
Irish nationalist United Ireland paper, under editors T. M. Healy
and William O’Brien, to the London press that labeled Irishmen as
murderers (following Irish political violence in 1882). Healy and
O’Brien published articles that named British officials working in
Dublin Castle—the location of the British colonial administration in
Ireland—and intimated that they were engaged in homosexual
activity. The libel trials that followed resulted in acquittals for the
United Ireland editors, which led to more freedom for newspaper
editors to pursue sexual scandals (Backus, 39–48). Backus argues
that this greater editorial freedom led Stead to inject “the sex scandal
directly into mainstream British journalism and politics” (63). This
in turn, of course, led to greater sensationalism for the popular press.
3. Books such as William Acton’s Prostitution Considered in its Moral,
Social, and Sanitary Aspects (1857), William W. Sanger’s The History
of Prostitution (1859), and James Miller’s Prostitution Considered in
Relation to its Cause and Cure (1859) raised economics as the
reason why many became prostitutes (Kent, xxiv). The government
did respond in 1864 and 1869 with the Contagious Disease Acts,
but rather than deal with the cause of prostitution, the acts, as
asserted by Greg Winston, “established a network of lock hospitals
for medical inspection and incarceration of prostitutes as a means of
protecting the [government’s] military” (226). Women suspected of
prostitution could be arrested, forced into an examination, and then

imprisoned if found to have a venereal disease, or if they objected to
the medical examination (Kent, xxiv; Winston, 226).
4. Shaw’s outrage with the workhouse system under Britain’s Poor
Law continued for decades. In 1910, on his second return to Dublin
after emigrating in 1876, Shaw delivered his lecture “Poor Law and
Destitution in Ireland.” The lecture attacked the Poor Law, and the
middle classes who allowed it, as well as poverty, to continue. To
read a transcript of the lecture, see “Shaw on Irish Destitution” in
Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, 33, pp. 4–16. For
further discussion on the lecture, see the author’s Shaw, Synge,
Connolly, and Socialist Provocation, University Press of
Florida, 2011.
5. In a November 22, 1887 letter to Arthur H. Mackmurdo, regarding
a sonnet on the very recent Trafalgar Square Bloody Sunday riot,
Shaw claimed that he had never spoken to Stead personally (Col-
lected Letters, I, 178). This may or may not have been true as Shaw
did not want to submit the sonnet for Mackmurdo to Stead.
6. The Conservative government under the Marquis of Salisbury
(Robert Cecil) came into office in 1886, following the collapse of
William Gladstone’s Liberal government.
7. Gladstone’s Liberal government introduced the first Irish Home
Rule Bill in 1886.
8. In a December 6, 1889 letter to Jules Magny, Shaw noted that
Massingham “is nominally the assistant editor; but it is he who really
forces the socialist programme into the Star [sic] in spite of T. P.
[O’Connor], who is merely a Home Ruler & does not believe that
socialism is a real political force” (Collected Letters, I, 233).
9. As Alexander II’s reformist policies did not go far enough, he was
assassinated in 1881 by revolutionaries. Almost immediately after
the assassination Alexander III canceled many of his father’s policies
that leaned toward reform, especially those that might have led
eventually toward a representative Parliament (http://www.
britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/14102/Alexander-III).
10. One such Russian dissident and anti-tsar revolutionary Shaw met
and knew in the 1880s was Nikolai Tchaikovski (Soboleva and
Wrenn, 15). Stead had publicly praised Alexander III prior to his
1888 Russian trip. In his June 8, 1887 letter to Stead on how to
direct The Pall Mall Gazette (and quoted in part above), Shaw
advised some reflection on his (Stead’s) public Russian views: “were

the Tsar personally another Angel Gabriel, we should none the less
be mad to build upon the stability or good faith of a despotic
bureaucracy” (Collected Letters, I, 172; Soboleva and Wrenn, 13).
11. A further curious side note to Stead’s time in Russia in May 1888, is
that he met Maud Gonne, who soon would inspire poet, and Shaw
friend, W. B. Yeats toward Irish themes and nationalism—and the
object of Yeats’ romantic infatuation for decades. Gonne later wrote
of her meeting with Stead by noting that he only talked about his
“sex obsession” (qtd. in Robinson, 146).
12. During this time, on August 13, Shaw wrote to The Star’s
O’Connor to complain that his article on the recent Pan-Anglican
Synod on Socialism was not published in favor of a leader on events
from 1622. Shaw’s letter neared its end with, “Oh, the new Jour-
nalism, the new Journalism!” (Laurence, “Notes,” Collected Letters,
I, 192). This was an interesting jest on Shaw’s part, given his own
involvement with the new journalism—rather than the sensational
trend—and his report on the Socialist Synod would have fallen
under the new journalism, as Shaw saw it, but so too did historical
leaders written for general readers.
13. Margot Gayle Backus’ argument, in the excellent Scandal Works, of
Stead as a scandalmonger—as opposed to Perry Curtis’ assertion
that Stead pioneered sensationalist shock journalism—suffers from
Backus’ failure to consider the Whitechapel murder press coverage,
which changed everything for the popular London press. But again,
Backus’ main focus in her book is James Joyce’s response to the
popular press, in London and Dublin, that caused harmed through
publicizing scandals.
14. Shaw most likely knew Parke as early as April 8, 1888, when he
mentions talking to Parke’s wife in his diaries (Diaries, I, 364). But
Shaw probably met Parke earlier in his association with The Star.
15. “Doss” was slang for sleep, or in this case, a bed in a building renting
beds nightly.
16. There exists some evidence of misguided decisions by Warren that
impacted the CID. In August 1888, Warren blocked Assistant
Commissioner James Munro’s appointment to CID of Melville
Macnaghten. Munro, a respected detective who had worked on
Fenian crimes in London, resigned and then was appointed by
Home Secretary Matthews to “Head the Detective Services,”
which was an advisory board. Numerous police detectives consulted

Munro on the Whitechapel murders, and the investigations may
have benefitted had Munro still officially led the police detectives.
Munro would eventually succeed Warren as the Metropolitan Com-
missioner, and in 1894 Macnaghten wrote what is considered one of
the strongest police statements on the Whitechapel murder investi-
gations—even though he was not then with the police but knew
Munro well. It is believed that his 1894 statement was a reflection of
Munro’s views (http://www.casebook.org/official_documents/
memo.html).
17. Parke’s attacks against landlords and Irish coercion in his leaders on
the murders, of course, may have been added by O’Connor.
18. Coverage in the London press of the United States war with the
Lakota Sioux, especially Colonel Custer’s defeat in 1876 at the Little
Bighorn was heavily covered at the time, with a lasting impression.
One of Custer’s officers, Captain Myles Keogh, was from a land-
owning family in County Offaly in Ireland.
19. The yards behind the Hanbury Street tenements, where Annie
Chapman was murdered, were separated from each other by short
and dilapidated walls. After killing and mutilating Chapman, the
killer apparently either exited the yard through the tenement’s
passageway, or climbed a wall and exited through the passageway
of a neighboring tenement.
20. The coroners’ inquest into Annie Chapman’s murder included tes-
timony from Dr. George Bagster Phillips, who conducted the exam-
ination of Chapman’s body. Aside from reporting that Chapman
showed signs of being extremely malnourished with lung disease,
probably consumption, he described the severe throat cut, from ear
to ear, and the abdomen mutilations. Her intestines had been
removed and placed beside her body, and her uterus and other
lower abdomen tissue had been removed and were missing. Again,
it appeared that the murderer was attempting to de-sex and
de-human(ize) the victim (http://www.casebook.org/victims/
chapman.html).
21. There exists a decidedly middle-class photograph of Annie Chapman
with her husband John, taken around 1869. After John’s death,
Annie’s class decline was dramatic. Seemingly, her economic reality,
shared with the other Whitechapel murder victims, forced her into
desperate efforts to survive, with life being reduced to surviving

(http://www.casebook.org/victims/chapman.html).
22. Dan Laurence and David Greene, in The Matter With Ireland,
attribute an unsigned leader in the April 30 edition of The Star to
Shaw, despite opposing views. Laurence and Grene concede that if
Shaw drafted the leader, it may have been amended by T. P.
O’Connor or H. W. Massingham (“Notes,” 22). The leader
responds to the April 23, 1888 condemnation by Pope Leo XIII
of the Irish agrarian practice of boycotting “oppressive landlords and
their agents.” The view in Ireland was that the Pope’s decree was
instigated by British diplomatic efforts (22). The leader calls on the
English people to reject their government’s diplomacy, and for the
Irish to “accept advice and counsel from no power on earth but the
political leaders they [have] chosen” (“The Tories and Ireland,” 24).
The advice for the Irish to follow elected Irish Party MPs definitely
seems to reflect O’Connor more than Shaw. Shaw authored no
other leaders (if he drafted a portion of the above leader), signed
or unsigned, on Home Rule for The Star under O’Connor’s editor-
ship. However, Shaw did write a satirical poem published on January
23, 1888, “A Balfour Ballad,” aimed at Arthur Balfour, then Chief
Secretary for Ireland. Touching on Home Rule, Shaw wrote pri-
vately to Tighe Hopkins on August 31, 1889 about his journalistic
views: “I do not say that a Home Ruler, if a journalist[,] might not
sink his opinions as completely as a compositor or reporter, and write
on principle, what he was paid for writing, whether it was Parnellist
or Balfourist in its tendency” (Collected Letters, I, 223–224). The
Irish question had a definite presence in the context of the White-
chapel murders, as it was a prevalent issue throughout late nine-
teenth century London.
23. Since Shaw and O’Connor agreed in February 1888 that Shaw
would continue to write the “occasional signed article,” it is possible
that Shaw’s “Blood Money to Whitechapel” was an article paid by
paragraphs, rather than a letter—even though O’Connor refers to it
as a letter. In his diary entry for September 20, Shaw writes: “Began
an article on . . . the Whitechapel murders for The Star” (Diaries, I,
413). Shaw does open “Blood Money to Whitechapel” as if a letter
to the editor.
24. O’Connor’s sense that the early Whitechapel murder victims were
killed swiftly and “possibly painless[ly]” came from the early coroner
inquests’ testimony from medical physicians who examined the

bodies and speculated the victims’ throats were deeply cut before
the mutilations. This changed with the last official Whitechapel
murder, that of Mary Jane Kelly. Kelly was killed inside her small
rented impoverished room in Millers’ Court, and she had defensive
wounds on her hands (http://www.casebook.org/victims/mary_
jane_kelly.html).
25. To read all of O’Connor’s “WHAT WE THINK” in The Star on September
24, 1888, introducing Shaw’s “Blood Money to Whitechapel,” see
http://www.casebook.org/press_reports/star/s880924.html.
26. Shaw suggests that the living conditions of the poor in East London,
which provoked the 1887 demonstrations in Trafalgar Square and
subsequent police response, were extremely well documented
before 1888—and they were as in the above mentioned The Bitter
Cry of Outcast London.
27. The Dynamitards not only referred to anarchists who bombed
1880s Britain, but also Irish Fenians who carried out a dynamite
bombing campaign in Britain during the decade. The Invincibles, of
course, referred to those who assassinated both the Chief Secretary
and Undersecretary for Ireland in Dublin in 1882.
28. The Party of “Hope and Perseverance” refers to the Liberal Party
and “Desperation and Death” refers to the Conservative Party.
29. “Lady Bountiful” meant an aristocratic or wealthy woman who
publicly participated in charitable activities for the poor—which for
Shaw meant giving back a fraction of the funds the wealthy took in
profits from the poor.
30. The People’s Palace, designed by E. R. Robson, was built in
London’s East End in 1886, exclusively with charitable funds from
wealthy patrons. It was, for Shaw, simply a response to working-class
demonstrations in 1886, and nothing that actually addressed East
End poverty. The Latin expression “panem et circenses” (bread and
game (or circuses)), relates to a government’s effort to appease the
discontented.
31. Shaw’s comments on the murders themselves were well informed.
He was right in referring to the killings as occurring in “Whitechapel
back-yards” with regard to the most recent at the time of his “Blood
Money to Whitechapel.” Annie Chapman had been killed in such a
backyard. The police constable who discovered the murder had
patrolled the backyard at 1.30 a.m. and seen nothing, but returning
on another round of his patrol at 1.44 a.m., discovered Chapman’s
remains (Rumbelow, 83).
32. Catherine Eddowes was one of two victims to be killed in a poverty-
stricken area directly adjacent to Whitechapel; her murder location
fell under the jurisdiction of the City of London Police—who
reported to London Corporation, the city’s governing body. Their
policing district was only for “one square mile.” Whitechapel and
East London were policed by the London Metropolitan Police,
directly answerable to the Home Secretary in the prime minister’s
government. Warren was Commissioner of the LMP. The differing
police forces complicated the investigation due to rivalries between
the City and Metropolitan Police forces. The assistant commissioner
of the City Police, Lt. Col. Sir Henry Smith, directed his force’s
investigations intently, and moved into Whitechapel pursuing leads,
where they had no jurisdiction. The overall head of the investigation
was Inspector Frederick George Abberline of Scotland Yard, who
had recently been promoted from the LMP’s H Division, which
served Whitechapel. But how much cooperation he received from
the City of London Police is not known (Rumbelow, 67–71).
33. Catherine Eddowes’ apron section being discovered in Goulston
Street indicated the murderer traveled into Whitechapel after killing
Eddowes, with Eddowes’ blood on his person.
34. The wall graffiti on Goulston Street beside the bloody, discarded
apron section from Catherine Eddowes, reportedly read: “The
Juwes are not / The men that / Will be / Blamed for nothing.”
However, there was and remains differing reports as to the actual
phrasing (Rumbelow, 67). The murderer may have written the
phrasing in order to throw suspicion away from himself, in case he
had been seen fleeing from Eddowes’ body. He was being pursued
aggressively by police after the nights’ two murders had been dis-
covered, with one constable reaching an outside water tap in time to
see bloody water on the ground. He concluded that the murderer
had just rinsed his hands. The meaning of the graffiti writing, if it
had one, has long been debated with no satisfactory conclusions—
but most likely the graffiti was a prejudicial effort to throw suspicions
in a direction away from the murderer, or was written by one
consumed with prejudice and hate, who wanted to generate more
hate (Rumbelow, 68). Whatever the meaning, it was discovered next

to the bloody apron cloth from Catherine Eddowes.
35. Donald Rumbelow, one of the leading Whitechapel murder histo-
rians, concludes that the Lusk kidney letter is the only letter, of
hundreds sent to the police, press, and vigilance committees during
the frenzy, “which has real credibility” (123).
36. To read the disturbing medical post-mortem report made during the
investigation by Dr. Thomas Bond on Mary Kelly, see http://www.
casebook.org/official_documents/pm-kelly.html.
37. Warren had resigned due to what he saw as the undermining of his
authority during the Whitechapel murders, specifically whether the
London Metropolitan Police’s CID were to report to him as Com-
missioner, or directly to the Home Secretary. And no doubt, criti-
cisms over Warren’s decision to erase the graffiti discovered adjacent
to Catherine Eddowes’ bloody apron section added to the pressure
on him (Rumbelow, 92).
38. On publishing Shaw’s Vizetelly’s letter, O’Connor added an edito-
rial statement at its end: “We largely agree with our correspondent.
We stated that it was not the business of the law to interfere in such
cases” (qtd. in Agitations, 13). The Irish-born novelist George
Moore, who would play a role in J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre
in a few years and later in the formation of the Irish Literary Theatre,
attempted to convert Stead’s views—but to no avail. The Vigilance
Association’s assault on Vizetelly was part of its attempt to combat
what it perceived as influential obscene literature (Frazier,
174–177).
39. Embracing the growing bourgeois sentiment against sexualized
literature emerging from the Whitechapel murders, the Scottish
author Robert Buchanan launched two attacks against George
Moore in early 1889. Buchanan’s “The Modern Young Man as
Critic,” in the University Review, suggested that sexual literature
“led to Jack the Ripper by way of George Moore” (qtd. in Frazier,
186). In Buchanan’s “Is Chivalry Still Possible?” in the Daily Tele-
graph in March 1889, Moore’s literature was charged with morally
corrupting a “seventeen-year-old girl of good family” (Frazier, 187).
Adrian Frazier suggests that such “charges against Moore fed the
popular hysteria,” in the wake of the murders, “about ‘pernicious
literature’” (187).
40. Events from 1889—a year after the Whitechapel murders were
thought to have commenced—confirmed the class divides and stan-
dards that had surfaced in the Whitechapel murders and its press
coverage that Shaw had outlined in “Blood Money to Whitechapel.”
Even some of the same players from 1888 were involved in the 1889
investigation. In August 1889, London’s General Post Office dis-
covered that a number of its teenage telegram men were working in
a male brothel on Cleveland Street. Heading the investigation was
Inspector Frederick Abberline, the lead detective in the Whitechapel
murders investigation. On August 20 one of the proprietors of the
brothel was arrested. Abberline’s investigation revealed that some of
the customers were well-known aristocrats, and possibly members of
government. Lord Arthur was identified by police as one. His solic-
itor supposedly informed the prosecutor that if testifying, Arthur
might name the Duke of Clarence, the eldest son of the Prince of
Wales. As a result, Arthur and other aristocrats were not prosecuted
and the co-proprietor’s trial was not sensationally reported in the
press (http://clevelandstreetscandal.com/). Eventually two news-
papers, Truth and the North London Press, did report that aristocrats
were among the brothel’s clientele. The North London Press was
edited by Ernest Parke, who at the time was still a journalist at The
Star. Parke named one of the aristocrats in his paper, Lord Euston.
Euston prosecuted Parke for libel and was represented by Arthur
Newton, who would later unsuccessfully represent Oscar Wilde in
1895 and Dr. Hawley Crippen in 1910. Parke was found guilty and
sentenced to a year in prison, a much harsher sentence than Stead’s
in 1885 for child abduction. (Newton’s success with Euston prob-
ably encouraged optimism in Wilde in his 1895 libel suit, but the
case was lost, leading to Wilde’s prosecution, conviction, and
severely harsh sentence.) During Parke’s trial and imprisonment,
Shaw edited the North London Press without salary until the paper
was absorbed by another.
On November 26, 1889, during the trial, Shaw wrote a letter to
The Star, which was rejected. He then sent the letter to Truth, which
also rejected it. In the letter, Shaw expressed concern for protecting
children (alluding to the young telegram men), and addressed homo-
sexuality and attempted to remove the hypocrisy of the respectable
who claimed ignorance of such, and urged society and the courts not
to enact the “outrageous penalties” that the existing law allowed. In
addition, Shaw referred to Parke: “My friend Parke . . . is menaced

with proceedings which would never have been dreamt of had he
advanced charges—socially much more serious—of polluting rivers
with factory refuse, or paying women wages needed to be eked out to
subsistence point by prostitution” (Letter, I, 230–232). In addition
to the point Shaw was making throughout his letter regarding
homosexuality and the respectable hypocrisy of condemning it, was
that aristocrats fared better in the case than did others, and publicly
naming an aristocrat exacted a heavy price on Parke. The young
telegram men were prosecuted and convicted. Shaw’s letter, of
course, would not be his last effort to urge decency and truthfulness
in the face of respectable class hypocrisy. Parke, in the Stead tradition
after imprisonment, returned to The Star and succeeded Massingham
as its editor in 1891.
Shaw’s affinity for Ernest Parke continued. On April 17, 1894, as
his play Arms and the Man was about to premier at London’s Avenue
Theatre, Shaw wrote to the theater’s manager, C. T. Helmsley.
Shaw’s letter listed a few names of friends and journalists he wished
to receive complimentary tickets, which included “Ernst Parke, The
Star [sic].” Shaw also requested tickets for two further associates from
his Star days, who had by 1894 moved on to other papers: T. P.
O’Connor and H. W. Massingham (Collected Letters, I, 424).
41. Booth’s writing of Darkest England and the Way Out was assisted by
W. T. Stead.
42. In his 1901 The People of the Abyss, which was written after time
spent living in Whitechapel, Jack London specifically remarked that
many women who turned to prostitution did so to avoid “the
horrors of working in, say, one of London’s white lead factories,
death from poisoning was a common occurrence” (137–138).
43. Mrs. Warren’s Profession was not professionally performed in Britain
until 1925, and in its 1905 New York premier, some members of the
cast and its producers were arrested.
44. Shaw served as theater critic for The Saturday Review from
1895–1898.
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. . . Pygmalion. Bernard Shaw: Plays, XIV. Androcles and the Lion, Overruled,
Pygmalion. New York: Wm. H. Wise & Company. 1930. 205–303.
. . . Shaw: An Autobiography, 1856-1898. Stanley Weintraub, ed. New York:
Weybright and Talley, 1969.
. . . “The Vizetelly Prosecution.” Bernard Shaw Agitations: Letters to the Press 1875-
1950. Dan H. Laurence and James Rambeau, ed., 12–13. New York: Frederick
Ungar Publishing Co., 1985.
. . . Widowers’ Houses. Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, Volume I. London: Constable,
1947.
Soboleva, Olga and Angus Wrenn. The Only Hope of the World: George Bernard Shaw
and Russia. New York: Peter Lang. 2012.
Stead, W. T. “The Blood-Thirst of the Day.” The Pall Mall Gazette, August
28, 1888. 1.
. . . “Horrible Murder in East London.” Pall Mall Gazette, August 31, 1888. 8.
. . . “The Shocking Murder in the East End.” Pall Mall Gazette, August 24, 1888. 8.
“Very Angry with Us.” The Star, September 15, 1888. 2.
Weightman, Gavin. “Paper Delivered at Stead 2012 Conference at the British
Library 17 April.” www.gavin-weightman.co.uk (accessed January 20, 2014).
Weintraub, Stanely. “Notes.” Bernard Shaw: The Diaries 1885-1897, Volume I.
College Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1986. 389.
“The Whitechapel Murder.” The Times. September 12, 1888. http://www.case
book.org/press_reports/times/18880912.html (accessed January 12, 2014).
Winston, Greg. Joyce and Militarism. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida,
2012.
CHAPTER 3
Parnell, Disarmament, and the Morality

Frenzy
In December 1889, roughly a year after Shaw proposed abolishing Christ-

mas in The Star during the immediate weeks following the last Whitechapel
murder, a low-impact Irish Party MP named Captain William O’Shea sued
his wife Katharine for divorce and named the leader of the Irish Party,
Charles Stewart Parnell, as the co-respondent. In fact, Parnell and Katharine
O’Shea had been living together and raising children for eight years, since
1881. While their relationship was known to many MPs and was even the
subject of gossip in the House of Commons as early as 1885, the few
London newspaper editors who knew the rumors by 1886 only published
obscure hints of the relationship—as in a May 24, 1886 note in W. T.
Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette on a minor collision between a florist van and
Katharine O’Shea’s carriage, which mentioned Parnell as a passenger
(Dungan, 272). But the public scandal that eventually emerged in
November 1890 proved ferocious and costly for Parnell, his party, and
Irish Home Rule. In the bourgeois, morally charged atmosphere following
the Whitechapel frenzy, the relationship was sensationally sexualized into a
morally outrageous scandal by the post-1888 London press once details of
the divorce court proceedings were known. Stead played a prominent part
in the furor. When Stead and other London pressmen turned the initial
press response into an anti-Parnell crusade, calling for his resignation from
the Irish Party in November 1890, Bernard Shaw responded, despite hav-
ing earlier resisted T. P. O’Connor’s pro-Irish Home Rule agenda in The
Star. Stead had already committed to a highly moralistic stance as a jour-
nalist in the wake of the Whitechapel Ripper. As Margot Gayle Backus

Journalism, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49007-6_3
argues, he had injected sexual scandal “directly in mainstream British jour-

nalism and politics” (63). The more often sexual scandal was reported in a
titillating and sensational style in his and other papers, the more Stead could
moralize on vice. This allowed a fascinated public to morally condemn while
openly discussing what they considered deviant sexuality.
As Stead played a major role in pioneering and popularizing London
sensational shock journalism during the 1880s, his editorship of the Pall
Mall Gazette finally became untenable with publisher Yates Thompson in
1889. In April of that year, the paper was successfully sued for libel, with the
blame resting on Stead who promptly secured funds for the libel damages
from diamond and gold capitalist—and imperialist—Cecil Rhodes, a new
object of Stead’s admiration (Schults, 248). In the aftermath of the lawsuit,
Stead became increasingly reckless in his efforts to reassert his earlier repu-
tation and editorial standing with the Gazette (Schults, 248).
With the hope of recapturing his Modern Babylon fame and in order to
confirm his position as the proponent of a new vogue of morality, Stead ran
the first of a series of articles on October 31 with the header, “Letters from
the Vatican: The Pope and the New World.” The approach was intended to
ascertain how the Papacy would “meet the challenge of three great devel-
opments of the modern era: the growing domination of English-speaking
people, the growth of a socialist basis in society, and the movement towards
women’s equality” (Schults, 249). The series provided few answers to these
questions—and even highlighted Stead’s misperception of a growing social
“socialist basis”—and did little to revive Stead’s reputation. As a conse-
quence, Stead began to envision the creation of a new paper with himself as
editor:
I am called to found for the Nineteenth Century a city of God which will be to
the age of the printing press and the steam engine what the Catholic Church
was to Europe of the 10th century. . . . It [the envisioned paper] will be father
confessor, spiritual director, moral teacher, political conscience. . . . It will be
the mother of mankind.” (qtd. in Schults, 248)
According to Shaw, Stead’s registered telegraphic address was “Vatican

London” (qtd. in Whyte, 304).
While the new paper did not materialize, and he was forced to leave the
Pall Mall Gazette in the final days of 1889, Stead quickly established and
edited a monthly magazine called the Review of Reviews. Launched in
PARNELL, DISARMAMENT, AND THE MORALITY FRENZY 61
January 1890, the magazine had the same aspirations he had harbored for a
new daily. That the magazine would demonstrate early on a bourgeois
morality was indirectly suggested in Stead’s last major leader article for the
Pall Mall Gazette, which appeared on December 29, 1889. The article
considered Parnell and his potential scandal, should the divorce case ever
be heard and Parnell’s reputation damaged. Stead wrote: Parnell “is not
quite the man to sacrifice a great cause [Irish Home Rule] to a guilty
passion” (qtd. in Schults, 251). After the divorce suit was filed, Stead had
been assured by Irish Party MP Michael Davitt, who knew Stead as a
contributor to the Pall Mall Gazette, that Parnell “could disprove the
allegation of an affair with Katharine O’Shea” (Callanan, Healy, 244).1
Seeing himself as the guardian of morality, the non-conformist Stead took
it upon himself to write directly to the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin,
William Walsh, in January 1890—one month after O’Shea had filed his suit.
Trying to reassure Walsh, Stead noted that the “next best thing” for
Parnell’s innocence to be proven was for Parnell to “cease conjugal relations
with Mrs. O’Shea . . . and publicly confess his sin” (qtd. in Robinson, 126).
However, Stead had reportedly told T. P. O’Connor as early as 1886 that
he had been aware of Parnell and Katharine O’Shea’s relationship for
months or more, and stated: “The question I am now considering is
whether I should ruin the Irish Party by exposing the liaison between
Parnell and Mrs. O’Shea” (qtd. in Dungan, 273–274). Stead remained
silent on the relationship until late 1890. Stead’s position would change
dramatically as the adultery was not disproved and the divorce court pro-
ceedings presented the opportunity for sensationalizing. This led Stead to
wear the moral mantle, champion decency and virtue, and become one of
Parnell’s “most virulent attackers” (Pullar, 149). In the late autumn and
early winter of 1890, in the Review of Reviews and in the various dailies he
contributed to, Stead campaigned against Parnell, “who, like himself, had
violated the Victorian moral code” (Schults, 251).2
STEAD, AND THE DEMONIZING OF PARNELL

When Captain O’Shea filed his divorce suit, it was two months before the
Conservative government’s special Parnell Commission—which met from
October 1888 to December 1889—published its report.3 In effect, the
commission verified that letters allegedly written by Parnell and published
by the conservative Times in 1887 to that effect, implicating Parnell and
other Irish Party MPs in Irish Fenian violence during the early 1880s, were
in fact forged by Richard Pigott.4 However, as Alvin Jackson argues in

Home Rule: An Irish History 1800–2000, while Parnell was “vindicated”
in regard to the letters in question the report did reveal some links between
the Irish Party and Irish agrarian violence, although these did not seemingly
weaken Parnell or the Irish Party. However, Tory support of the letters did
damage the Conservative Party after they were exposed as forgeries (74).
Yet Jackson also suggests that most of the public, British and Irish, knew
little or anything about the O’Shea divorce case until it was heard in court
over two days in November 1890. Evidence was presented by Captain
O’Shea’s council but with no challenge from either Katharine O’Shea or
Parnell, even though Parnell had intimated the previous winter that Captain
O’Shea was complicit in the relationship, which he probably was.
On November 17, 1890, Captain O’Shea “obtained a decree nisi of
divorce” (Callanan, Parnell, 9). On the following day, British papers
reported the court proceedings, including the Manchester Guardian (with
a large Irish readership in industrial Manchester), edited by Liberal Party
supporter C. P. Scott, which included the prosecuting barrister’s
summation:
If the husband was a conniving and consenting party, why all the disguise?
Why the assumption by Mr. Parnell of names that did not belong to him . . .?
Above all, why when the husband comes to the door unexpectedly, does
Mr. Parnell, who is in the drawing-room with Mrs. O’Shea, escape by the
balcony and fire escape, and then a few minutes afterwards come round and
present himself at the door as an ordinary visitor?5
Frank Callanan writes:
The [court] evidence rendered Parnell ludicrous as well as dishonourable.

Two allegations in particular gained currency. The first, and most damaging,
was the unfounded surmise of a maidservant that Parnell to avoid Captain
O’Shea must have on several occasions fled by a fire-escape from the house on
Medina Terrace to reappear at the door asking for the Captain. The second,
true, allegation was that Parnell had made use of several aliases, including
those of “Preston” and “Fox.” (Parnell, 9)
The London press attacks were swift and extensive. The Times—which
had a particular axe to grind over Parnell given its publication of the forged
Piggot letters—no doubt relished the court evidence and sensed a moral
scandal to be sensationalized that could seriously damage Parnell, and the
Irish Party. The paper vehemently opposed the Irish Party and the Home
Rule agenda. The Times reported:
Domestic treachery, systematic and long continued deception, the whole

squalid apparatus of letters written with the intent of misleading, houses
taken under false names, disguises and aliases, secret visits, and sudden flights
make up a story of dull and ignoble infidelity, untouched, so far as can be seen,
by a single ray of sentiment, a single flash of passion, and comparable only to
the dreary monotony of French middle-class vice, over which M. Zola’s
scalpel so lovingly lingers. (qtd. in Callahan, Parnell, 9–10)
The assertion that the relationship was only sexual, followed by the
allusion to French solicitous literature, seemed to insinuate the immorality
and foreignness of Parnell’s behavior. This perhaps was not far from British
popular thinking after 1888 which perceived debasing and deviant behavior
as being influenced by such alien literature—whether from Zola himself or
Zola-influenced authors, like the Irish novelist George Moore.6 And The
Times seemingly inferred that Parnell’s disguises and deceptions were sor-
did, deceitful, and unbecoming for an MP. There was also, perhaps, an
implied criminal and horrific aspect to disguises given that such, undoubt-
edly, were involved in the recent Whitechapel murders. And certainly the
sense of the secret life—undoubtedly practiced by the murderer, and
flaunted in an 1888 serialized, anonymous, underground, erotic novel, My
Secret Life (in the same year as the murders)—was shunned by respectable
moralists. Such would be satirized in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 The Importance of
Being Earnest, where the secret life leads to pleasure outside conventional,
moral, social expectations.7
On November 20, 1890, the Irish Party turned a planned meeting in
Dublin’s Leinster Hall in support of evicted Irish tenants, into “a public
demonstration in support of Parnell [which was] attended by a large con-
tingent of the Irish Party” (Callahan, Parnell, 10).8 The Party seemed
poised to continue to stand with Parnell, despite the revelations from the
divorce proceedings and the increasing press furor in London calling for
Parnell’s resignation as leader or expulsion from the Party. On the same day
and in the interest of stirring up more sensational shock, Stead wrote to the
Liberal Party leader and former (recent) Prime Minister (who had advo-
cated Home Rule), William Gladstone. He apprised Gladstone that he
(Stead) was now going all out against Parnell (Callanan, Parnell, 17).
Once Parnell’s “deceitful” tactics in his relationship were exposed, Stead
could see Parnell as having violated the public trust of his (Parnell’s)
supporters—despite the fact that Stead had violated the trust of many, like
Shaw, by fabricating the main story in his 1885 “Maiden Tribute to Modern
Babylon” series. Stead’s anti-Parnell crusade was to be carried forth on
moral terms, and now sought to sever Parnell from his most prominent
British political ally, Gladstone. Stead warned Gladstone, “I know my Non-
conformists well, and no power on earth will induce them to follow that
man [Parnell] to the poll or you either, if you are arm in arm in [sic] him”
(qtd. in Callanan, Parnell, 17–18). Stead also sent Gladstone a copy of the
leader he had written for the next day’s Daily Chronicle, which he titled
“Home Rule or Mr. Parnell” (Callanan, Parnell 32–33). By this time, Stead
was again writing to Catholic Church leaders in Ireland, such as Walsh
and William Croke, Archbishop of Cashel, demanding that they call for
Parnell to step down as Irish Party leader (Morrissey, Walsh, 127). As Stead
surely had hoped, the scandal stirred by the London press inspired noncon-
formist church leaders in Britain to publicly clamor for the removal of the
immoral Parnell. They contributed leaders and letters to the popular
London press, which eagerly printed them, and they condemned Parnell
in their church papers. Responding generally to this press fury against
Parnell, and specifically to Baptist minister John Clifford’s attack on Parnell
titled “He Must Go,” Shaw, on November 20, three days after the divorce
case was heard, wrote and published a letter supporting Parnell in The Star.
By this time Shaw was the paper’s music critic, known as “Corno di
Bassetto.”9 Once again, Shaw responded to sensationalizing press frenzy,
and did so in his own name.
SHAW ENTERS THE FRAY

Shaw’s first Parnell letter was published in The Star, under the paper’s new
editor H. W. Massingham. Shaw’s involvement in the change of editors had
been significant. Reflecting in Fabian Tract No. 41 in 1892, Shaw wrote
that before 1888 ended, he and the Fabian Society had managed to encour-
age Massingham (then deputy editor of The Star) to write various
“extreme” radical leaders in the paper, essentially clashing with O’Connor’s
editorial policy (Havighurst, 25). This led to blatant disagreements between
O’Connor and Massingham over the paper’s direction. Tensions increased
by March 1890, leading O’Connor to write to Shaw suggesting that The
Star could do without his music reviews (O’Connor knew that Shaw had
been aligning himself with Massingham over Shaw’s belief that he was being
underpaid). Shaw responded to O’Connor: “If Massingham goes, my going

with him will (1) double the éclat of his martyrdom, and (2) be an additional
proof of your bad editing” (qtd. in Havighurst, 32). Neither Shaw nor
Massingham left at this point, and Massingham finally gained full control of
the paper after he went over O’Connor’s head to the paper’s investors and
then purchased O’Connor’s shares in the paper, which was followed by the
editor’s resignation on July 1, 1890 (Havighurst, 30). On November 20 of
the same year, in the heat of the Parnell crisis, Massingham published
Shaw’s letter, “Shall Parnell Go?”, alluding to Clifford’s moralistic condem-
nation and call for Parnell’s banishment from public political life.10
As The Star was still financially backed by Liberal Party supporters,
Massingham had little choice but to support and participate in the Parnell
morality assaults. However, he still published Shaw’s letter, perhaps out of
loyalty to Shaw. Massingham certainly was one of the few editors who
would have dared to do so. No doubt, publishing Shaw’s letter did not
endear him to The Star’s investors; Massingham himself was forced to resign
from the paper within two months, in January 1891. Shaw’s first Parnell
letter cut through the moralistic grandstanding of Clifford and Stead to the
heart of the real issue, the law:
SIR,—May I go so far as to express my feeling that the “He Must Go” letter
from the anchorite of Westbourne-park Chapel is nonsense. In my opinion,
which is quite as representative on this point as Dr. Clifford’s, the relation
between Mr. Parnell and Mrs. O’Shea was a perfectly natural and right one;
the whole mischief in the matter lay in the law that tied the husband and wife
together and forced Mr. Parnell to play the part of clandestine intriguer,
instead of enabling them to dissolve the marriage by mutual consent, without
disgrace to either party. Dr. Clifford has no right to speak of Mr. Parnell as
“convicted of immorality”; it is the law that has been convicted of immorality.
If “the conscience of the nation is aroused,” so much the better; but I doubt
it. Dr. Clifford’s letter does not shew [sic] much sign of it. Until marriage laws
are remodelled to suit men and women and to further the happiness and health
of the community, instead of to conform to an ideal of “purity,” no verdict in a
divorce case will force any man to retire from public life if it appears that he
behaved no worse than the law forced him to. Mr. Parnell’s business is simply to
sit tight and let the pure people talk. G. Bernard Shaw. (“Shall,” 30–31)
Shaw’s sense of the existing marriage law as being immoral was, of course,
directly to the point. And it was that immoral law—immoral in that it kept
some couples in misery—that clearly led Parnell to be deceitful.11 If there was
no need to use aliases and disguises, then obviously Parnell would not have
used them. The aliases did not indicate a criminal, in Shaw’s view, but
criminalized the law and revealed its immorality. Shaw’s journalism in this
instance dismissed the nonsense of the sensational journalism that focused, or
fixated on Parnell’s supposed immorality confirmed by Parnell’s deceit. In
Shaw’s rational response, the marriage law was the only criminal, which was
meant to encourage consideration of Parnell and the law. Along these lines
was Shaw’s advice for Parnell at the end of the letter, “to sit tight and let the
pure people talk.” It was the right tactic on November 20, 1890. And, of
course, the “pure people” referred to moralists like Clifford and Stead, even if
some were pure hypocrites, like the adulterous Stead.
On November 22, the Liberal MP John Morley, whom Alvin Jackson
describes as having been Gladstone’s “faithful henchman,” warned Glad-
stone of “the intensity of the Liberal hostility to Parnell” that was quickly
growing from the press attacks against Parnell since the divorce ruling
(Jackson, 75; Callanan, Parnell, 18). Morley, interestingly was the Liberal
MP Shaw had criticized in his early political leaders for The Star in February
1888, which then editor T. P. O’Connor had edited out, prompting Shaw
to resign as a regular political contributor (Gibbs, 143).
In addition to Morley, Liberal MP Sir William Harcourt also advised
Gladstone on Parnell. He reported on British public reactions to the moral-
ity charge: “the opinion was absolutely unanimous and extremely strong that
if Parnell is allowed to remain as leader of the Irish Party all further
co-operation between them and the English Liberals must end. You know
that the Nonconformists are the backbone of our party, and their judge-
ment on this matter is unhesitating and decisive” (qtd. in Dungan, 349).
On November 23, some Liberal MPs expressed privately to some Irish
Party MPs “that they thought Parnell should give up the leadership for a
time” (Callanan, Parnell, 18). Two days later, revealing that the London
press anti-Parnell morality crusade was clearly having its effect on the Liberal
Party, a letter from Gladstone to Morley was shown to some Irish Party
MPs, who expressed the Party’s and Gladstone’s belief that Parnell should
indeed go (Callanan, Parnell, 18–19). On November 25, Morley tried to
find Parnell at Westminster to show him a second letter from Gladstone to
himself (Morley) that included Gladstone’s threat to resign from the Liberal
leadership if Parnell remained as the Irish Party leader. Before Morley
located Parnell, the Irish Party overwhelmingly re-elected Parnell as its
chairman. After the vote, Morley found Parnell, who informed him of the
outcome (Callanan, Parnell, 19).
Following the Irish Party vote and his conversation with Parnell, Morley
reported both to Gladstone, who then decided to publish his second letter
to Morley, the version with his resignation threat. The publication was
arranged in a special edition of the Pall Mall Gazette, which still maintained
its ties to the Liberal Party. The publication of the letter, and the news of
Parnell’s re-election as party leader, increased the London press crusade
against Parnell. The involvement of Gladstone in the Parnell business and
the publication of Gladstone’s letter combined with further public frenzy
stirred by Stead and religious journalist Hugh Price Hughes. Hughes wrote
in the Methodist Times that Parnell proved that the Irish are “an obscene
race utterly unfit for anything except a military despotism” (qtd. in Robin-
son, 128). All of this now drew a second letter of protest from Shaw to The
Star, which Massingham published on November 27 under the header,
“The Other Side. Bernard Shaw Repeats His Sticking Tight Advice” (31).
As the moral (and consequently political) heat on Parnell was turned up,
Shaw wrote a more searing and powerful signed letter, which began:
The appearance of Mr. Gladstone in the Parnell controversy calls for another
word of protest from those who refuse to be bluffed out of their common-
sense by the promulgation as “English public opinion” of the inhuman and
ridiculous views of Mr. Stead and Mr. Hugh Price Hughes, and the morbidly
sexual members of the community in general.
The “morbidly sexual members of the community” were those of the

public who enjoyed (for titillating value or for self-righteous judging) press
reports on sexual scandals and behavior. No doubt they had been awakened
or forged by the Whitechapel reporting. Shaw continued:
It is not surprising that these gentlemen have terrorized the Liberal press for
the moment. Mr. Stead has always had the courage of his monstrous opinions;
and the rest are emboldened by the fact that they have a considerable follow-
ing in quarters to which the Liberal party now looks for pecuniary support
against the Tories on the one hand and the working classes on the other. But if
a line is to be drawn anywhere, it must be drawn at the views of
Mr. Gladstone, who recently gave to the world in a magazine article a
statement of his ideas on sexual morality, which I do not hesitate to describe
as more repugnant to popular feeling than Mormonism is.12 Mr. Stead would
ostracize Mr. Parnell because he has committed adultery; but Mr. Gladstone
would ostracize Captain O’Shea because he has committed the sin of divorc-
ing the woman with whom he took the sacrament of marriage for better for
worse. If Mr. Parnell had been the petitioner instead of the co-respondent,
Mr. Gladstone would nonetheless have condemned him. Nay, if he had
merely been guilty of marrying a widow, like the late Lord Beaconsfield, he
would have fallen equally under the ban of the Gladstonian ideal. In short,
Mr. Gladstone is in this, as in most other open questions, the least represen-
tative man in the country. For example, there are beyond doubt people—
mostly landlords—who share his view that the system of country gentleman,
tenant farmer, and agricultural labourer is destined to be eternal in England by
sheer force of fitness; and I myself know men who agree with him that “thrift
is the true solution of the social problem for railway employees earning from
sixteen shillings to a guinea a week.” But on the marriage question he is
practically alone—alone in the rear. Mr. Parnell may safely leave his opinion
out of account.
Alluding to Gladstone’s lack of a social reform policy for the country,

while advocating the strictest sanctity of marriage vows, allowed Shaw to
demonstrate that Gladstone—and the conventionalized Liberal Party—
were void of any policies for the betterment of the country’s population.
Shaw certainly felt that Gladstone’s sudden involvement in the Parnell
situation was unfounded and damaging. And in both of his letters on Parnell
to The Star, Shaw intimated that his view on the alleged scandal was
representative of many people. In the second letter he did this by charging
that Gladstone, leader of the Liberal Party, was “the least representative
man in the country.” Next Shaw responded carefully to the letter-writers to
the press who attacked Parnell on his exhibited deceit:
As to the large number of people who have written to papers to explain that
they do not in the least mind adultery, but that what they cannot bear is
deceit, I would put the following cases to them:—The Coercion Act [for
Ireland that prohibited free assembly in Ireland and Britain for protest, which
led to the 1887 Trafalgar Square Riot in London] has forced upon many
members of the Irish party the alternative of either spending all their time in
prison and giving up public meeting in Ireland, or else practising repeated
deceptions upon the constabulary. In Russia, in the same way, constitutional
reformers are driven to employ all the devices of criminals—disguises, false
passports, aliases, bribes, and so on. Suppose, I say, that the character of these
reformers cannot be cut in two halves—that the man who deceives the
policeman will deceive his political followers—that there cannot be two
standards of morality, one for your conduct towards your sovereign and the
other for your conduct towards the people!13 Again, in the old days, when the
law hung men who stole articles of a greater value than forty shillings, juries
kept on declaring the value of stolen articles to be under that sum, no matter
what they were really worth, until the law was altered. Suppose, I say, that
these men were liars, and therefore unfit for public life. Will the persons who
are revolted by Mr. Parnell’s resort to aliases and to the fire escape (with its
irresistibly humorous sequel) support me in these idiotic contentions? If not,
what becomes of their cognate argument?
Shaw’s examples of the absurdity, or idiocy, of the attacks based solely on

deceit without understanding Parnell’s need for the deceit, separated the
sensational nonsense from the truth about Parnell’s “deceit” for readers to
intelligently consider—provided they read Shaw’s words. This process
blended well into Shaw’s next subject for discussion—the marriage law:
In France and in some American States, when a marriage turns out unhappily,
and the position of the parties becomes insufferable, they can, on making due
provision for any responsibilities they may have incurred by their mistake, free
one another and marry again if they wish. In this country there is no release.
All the suffering which is now being inflicted on Mr. Parnell and his “accom-
plice” (as Dr. Clifford would call her) and all the disastrous consequences
threatened to the Irish Nationalist Party would have happened equally had
Mr. Parnell forced Captain O’Shea to take proceedings years ago by openly
defying the law. Whether you walk proudly down the front stairs or are
ignominiously caught on the fire-escape, Messrs Clifford, Price Hughes, and
Frederick Harrison (from whom I should have expected better things) are
equally ready to stone you at the foot.14 I contend that whilst the law remains
in that wicked and silly condition its verdicts and decrees nisi can produce no
genuine conviction of its victim’s unfitness for public life, in spite of the
utmost hubbub that can be raised by the men who are prepared to stick at
nothing in their determination to “purify public life.”
Shaw’s rational commentary attempted to make the law the culprit, not
Parnell’s morals. Shaw then repeated his advice to Parnell, which was sound
and clearly the right path on November 26, 1890. The Irish Party had
decided to meet from December 1 to December 5 to discuss its position,
with December 5 being nine days from Shaw’s November 26 letter:
I therefore again urge Mr. Parnell to “sit tight.” Nine days hence my argu-
ment for the reform of the marriage laws will be as sound as it is today, whilst
nothing will remain of the denunciations of Mr. Price Hughes and
Mr. Harrison except a fading reminiscence of their controversial style. The
“public opinion” which they represent on this subject is so thoroughly
ill-conditioned and thoughtless that Mr. Parnell will set a most wholesome
example by defying it. It is indeed precisely by his inflexible indifference to the
unsympathetic and unintelligent clamours which rise every now and then
from the nurseries of English prejudice that Mr. Parnell has struck the popular
imagination and created the Parnell myth. I hope he will not now let himself
be cowed by an indecent threat from faint-hearted and treacherous allies to
support Lord Hartington, actively or passively, at the next election.
G. Bernard Shaw. (“Shaw Repeats,” 31–33)
Lord Hartington was William Cavendish, who in 1890 was leader of the
Liberal Unionist Party, which was composed of MPs who had split from the
Liberal Party during the mid-1880s due to their opposition to Gladstone’s
advocacy for Home Rule.15 The “indecent threat” Shaw refers to was
Gladstone’s threat, in his letter published in the Pall Mall Gazette, to
resign—therefore shattering the Liberal Party—if Parnell remained as Irish
Party leader. Shaw was correct, in the long if not the short term, in believing
that if Parnell did not resign, he would serve as a “wholesome example” of
defiance of the antiquated marriage law and the press-generated frenzy over
the supposed morality and deceit. But while Parnell, as Shaw hoped, did not
allow himself to be cowed by the press, he did respond to Gladstone’s threat
by drafting a “Manifesto to the Irish People”—rather than do nothing.
Parnell may have still survived, except the majority of Irish Party MPs, which
Shaw did not anticipate, were cowed by Gladstone’s threat and the relent-
less press attacks in London. The press coverage in Dublin, up to that time,
was still more supportive of Parnell than not. That changed once the anti-
Parnell Irish MPs organized their opposition and sought control over
Dublin’s Home Rule papers. This growing opposition to Parnell was led,
in part, by T. M. Healy, who once he saw the opposition in England coming
from “pro-Irish Liberals” (the Liberal Party), and not from Tories (the
Conservative Party), changed his position on Parnell (Callanan, Parnell,
11–12). And the Liberals clearly turned against Parnell as they cowed to the
London popular press’ morality calls for Parnell to go.
Perhaps an early sign that Parnell was not going to weather the frenzy was
the lack of any challenge to Shaw’s Parnell letters in The Star, particularly
regarding the second and more substantial letter that further exposed the
immoral marriage law. The law, of course, was the real issue for Shaw, not a
scandal that really was no scandal had the marriage law been modernized.
While Shaw’s journalism was sound and maturing, it was not having the
impact he sought. Shaw wrote on December 12, 1890 to Fabian E. D.
Girdlestone: “I do not know whether you saw my second letter in the Star
[sic]. Nobody has made even a pretence of answering it.” Shaw then added,
“just as you must have a good property law before you can safely hold the
thief up to reprobation, so you must have a good marriage law before you
can do likewise to the adulterer” (Collected Letters, I, 274). Shaw’s difficulty
here was not his postulating the truth, but rather that his lone, critical,
journalistic voice was up against the overwhelming sensationalizing press,
both Liberal and Conservative—Shaw’s reputation as a “force” was still not
recognized by most Londoners. However, by December 12, events had
progressed significantly with regard to Parnell serving as an example of
defiance to the marriage law, or in defiance of the no-confidence that
many of his party colleagues demonstrated over the first week of December.
Events were folding in on Parnell.
SHAW AND PARNELL’S FALL

On November 28—one day after Shaw’s second Parnell letter was
published—Parnell drafted his “Manifesto to the Irish People” as members
of his party contemplated Gladstone’s threat. The manifesto was published
on November 29 in Dublin’s Home Rule Freeman’s Journal. In his Man-
ifesto, Parnell attacked Gladstone and the Liberal Party—the allies of the
Irish Party for most of the preceding decade. As they had turned on Parnell,
he now tried to define a direction for his party without having to depend on
a Liberal alliance. However, this new tactic only increased the London press
attacks and helped the majority of the Irish Party MPs who were turning
against Parnell. The party’s meetings over the first five days of December
debated Parnell’s and the party’s future (Jackson, 76). At this point, the
London press began to forcefully call into question Parnell’s state of mind,
insinuating that all of his immoral behavior—and his turn against the Liberal
Party—was evidence of a mentally unfit leader. The Truth wrote on
December 4 that there had always been “in Mr. Parnell a certain weirdness,
which, under great stress, might develop” (qtd. in Callanan, Parnell, 26).
Then on December 5, with Healy’s urging, 44 MPs voted against Parnell,
while 26 supported him.16 By the time Shaw had written his letter to
Girdlestone on December 12, the damage to Parnell was done; but since
Shaw still wrote the letter, we may surmise that for the internationalist
Shaw, the point of real debate was clearly still the marriage law. As for
Parnell, the press attacks had successfully demonized him.
On the day of Shaw’s Girdlestone letter, London’s The Graphic ran an

illustration of Parnell in a large coat, dark top hat, and shifting eyes, titled
“Deposed”—reminiscent of some 1888 press illustrations of Jack the Rip-
per. Rather than holding a long knife or a black bag, as in Ripper illustra-
tions, The Graphic’s Parnell clutches papers labeled “Amendment” and,
presumably, “Resolution.” Of course, given libel laws and the recent
Pigott-forged Parnell letters, suggestive illustrations like The Graphic’s
could only go so far. However, such illustrations may have reflected a
general impression among some Members of Parliament of possible shared
and sordid similarities between Parnell and the Whitechapel murders. In a
November 3, 1888 letter—written six days before Mary Jane Kelly’s brutal
murder—Henry Du Pre Labouchere, of the Radical Party, wrote to Henry
Gladstone (son of William Gladstone) and articulated that very sentiment as
gossip. And, of course, these two MPs knew of Parnell’s relationship with
Katharine O’Shea well before O’Shea filed his divorce suit:
Parnell insists to Lewis [Parnell’s solicitor Sir George Lewis] that he never sees
Mrs. O’Shea now. Neither Lewis, nor his [Parnell’s] secretary [Henry]
Campbell have any notion where he lives. I left him [Parnell] a few days ago
at about 12 at night. He had on a filthy flannel shirt, a still more filthy white
coat with the collar turned up, and a pot hat. In his hand, he carried a shiny
leather bag. I could not help thinking, as he vanished into space, that he ran
the risk of being arrested as the Whitechapel murderer. However he takes a
great interest in the case, and shirks no work in the connection with it. (qtd. in
Callanan, Healy, 202)
Despite public portraits such as The Graphic’s that successfully

demonized Parnell, and MPs’ gossip that absurdly linked the immoral
Parnell to Jack the Ripper, Parnell remained defiant as he contested the
by-elections in Ireland on December 22, 1890, and April 2 and July
8, 1891.
As Parnell campaigned in Ireland, Stead continued his efforts to drive
Parnell from the political and public stages, all because of his supposed
immoral acts committed in the face of an archaic and unforgiving marriage
law with a partner to whom he had made a lasting and serious commitment.
In the January 1891 edition of Paternoster Review, Stead—without first-
hand knowledge—drummed out an article suggesting that Parnell was
deranged:
Pale and haggard with what seemed the fierce light of incipient madness
flashing in his eyes, he hurried from town to town, from village to village,
from hamlet to hamlet, breathing out threatenings and vengeance against the
men who dared to oppose him. He spoke as if he had been the heir of a
hundred kings insulted by the treachery of a miscreant mob. (qtd. in Callanan,
Parnell, 72–73)
Parnell pressed his campaign and that of his followers further into 1891.
Parnell attempted to advocate a Home Rule state that would differ from
the state proposed through the Liberal Party’s Home Rule bill of 1885, and
which the Liberal Party still supported. Parnell’s new vision was defined
mostly by a “heightened interest in the labouring poor” and by a land
purchase program “that favoured small residential landlords and small
tenants.” The anti-Parnellites, still led at first mostly by Healy, supported
a land purchase program that echoed the Liberal Party’s land reform policies
and particularly catered to the new Catholic middle-class landowners
emerging from land purchase (Jackson, 77–78).
Parnell’s 1891 agenda anticipates the Ireland Shaw advocates in his 1904
Irish play John Bull’s Other Island. The play raises questions about the land
reforms implemented along the lines of Healy’s pro-Liberal Party agenda,
allowing for the new landowners, represented in the play by characters
Matthew Haffigan, Barry Doran, Cornelius Doyle, and supported by Father
Dempsey, to conspire to keep laborers, portrayed through character Patsy
Farrell, landless and beneath them in class. The play’s Larry Doyle calls
Matthew Haffigan on this very issue, a land policy that only increases the
viciousness toward the laboring class through the new small landowners
with their greed:
What call have you to look down on Patsy Farrell? . . . Do you think because
you’re poor and ignorant and half-crazy with toiling and moiling morning
noon and night, that you’ll be any less greedy and oppressive to them that
have no land at all than old Nick Lestrange [a former landlord], who was an
educated travelled gentleman that would not have been tempted as hard by a
£100 as you’d be by five shillings? Nick was too high above Patsy Farrell to be
jealous of him; but you, that are only one little step above him, would die
sooner than let him come up that step; and well you know it. (John Bull’s,
118–119)
Parnell’s new vision of Land Reform, separate from the Liberal Party,
swayed few and the 1891 campaigns in the by-elections did not go well for
Parnell and the Parnellites. His own seat, Cork City, was lost on October 6, the
day Parnell died at the age of forty-five.
The Parnell divorce and demise episodes were extremely important for
Shaw, despite the fact that his letters on behalf of Parnell in The Star did not
generate intense debate, nor led Parnell to political and moral survival. In
December 1890, following the Irish Party’s split after Gladstone and the
Liberal Party were cowed by the London press assaults, Shaw wrote to
Fabian Sidney Olivier about future Fabian policies. In his December 16 let-
ter, Shaw proposed that a new Fabian manifesto
should emphatically repudiate the Liberal Party and denounce Gladstone in

express terms. We have had a startling object lesson in temporising. The
nation, as far as it feels anything, is disgusted more or less consciously by the
miserable exposure of trimming and hypocrisy over this Parnell case. Nobody
now believes in either Party: Parnell has done for one [Liberal Party] what
Pigott did for the other [Tory Party]. . . . we must proclaim ourselves, not as
an advanced guard of the Liberal Party, but a defiantly Social-Democratic
party, prepared to act with the Radical Party as far as that party pursues its
historic mission of overthrowing Capitalist Liberalism in the interest of the
working class. (Collected Letters, I, 276)17
While the Fabian Society did not adopt such a radical agenda in late
1890, Shaw, arguably, would never forgive the Liberal Party for consciously
allowing itself to be led away from its professed “liberal” principals, with
regard to Parnell and Ireland—and social reform. In John Bull’s Other
Island, Shaw portrayed the English Tom Broadbent as a Liberal Party
member, and devotee to the memory of Gladstone, who “conquers” the
Irish village of Rosscullen while appearing amicable through his relentless
foolishness. In his preface to the play, written for its 1907 publication, Shaw
noted that he portrayed “Broadbent as infatuated in politics, hypnotized by
his newspaper-leader-writers and parliamentary orators into an utter paral-
ysis of his common sense” (“Preface for Politicians,” 444). Devoid of
commonsense meant that the Liberal Party and its devout supporters were
at best dangerous in Shaw’s eyes. The Liberal Party would only, over
decades, contribute to Shaw’s thorough disdain for the party as it led Britain
into Irish and labor calamities, and then into the Great War. The insidious
danger in 1890–1891 of the sensationalizing London press’ ability to
impact both Liberal and Tory Parties, and that press’ willingness to be
used by both Parties to the detriment of intelligent social public debate was,
presumably, abundantly clear to Shaw.
The Parnell scenario was of great importance in Shaw’s personal devel-
opment. At the time, Shaw had begun to formulate his critique of Ibsen,
culminating in an 1890 Ibsen lecture and The Quintessence of Ibsenism,
published in 1891. Of course, recent London productions of Ibsen’s plays
had assisted in Shaw’s continuing evaluation of the playwright, but Shaw’s
approach to Ibsen also had much to do with how he dealt with women and,
naturally, marriage, since marriages at the time entrapped many women
who had no easy recourse to escape an unhappy relationship. This is
touched on when Shaw, in his second Parnell letter to The Star, drew
attention to John Clifford’s reference to Katharine O’Shea in his morality
attacks as Parnell’s “accomplice.” Shaw traces this process in two letters to
French translator Jules Magny, with the first on December 16, 1890, eleven
days after the Irish Party split. Shaw alluded to his recent Ibsen lecture and
how an assessment of Ibsen had enabled Shaw to respond to morality press
editors, such as Stead, who were promoting a pure societal righteousness, as
if they were the definers of social values—something, of course, which Stead
believed did apply to him (Schults, 248). Shaw wrote:
I attack the current morality because it has come to mean a system of strict
observance of certain fixed rules of conduct. Thus, a “moral” man is one who
keeps the ten commandments; and an “immoral” man is one who breaks
them. Among the more thoughtful classes of this evil (for such I hold it to be)
is intensified by the addition to ten commandments of sentimental obligations
to act up to ideal standards of heroism. (Collected Letters, I, 277)
The connections to Parnell’s political demise in December 1890 are clear

in Shaw’s letter. His statement of the pure morality forcing “ideal standards
of heroism” anticipates his 1894 play Arms and the Man, in which these
ideal standards are satirically portrayed as shallow and outdated shams. This
is an interesting insight into Shaw’s mindset that was beginning to see the
relationship between the morality sensationally projected by editors like
Stead, and its related heroism that played into the growing militarism
among Europe’s powers. It was the type of mindset that would mark the
intellectual modernizing movement.18 In a second letter of December 18 to
Magny, Shaw returned to an explanation of his public assault on press-
promoted conventional and bourgeois morality, particularly with regard to
its ideal of women. The London press clearly placed much of the blame for
Parnell’s “adultery”—and therefore fall—on Katharine O’Shea, in that at

no time did she sacrifice herself to alleviate the scandal, a theme also taken
up eventually by anti-Parnellite Irish MPs. Shaw wrote:
I have been led to discuss it publicly by the stress laid by conventional idealists
like Stead on the beauty of self-sacrifice in Woman. He declares that a true
woman finds in self-sacrifice “the supreme satisfaction of the soul.” In my
Ibsen paper occurs the following:—“Of all the idealist abominations that
make society pestiferous, I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing
self-sacrifice on a woman and then pretending that she likes it; and if she
ventures to contradict the pretence, declaring her no true woman.” (Collected
Letters, I, 279)
Shaw’s quote from his Ibsen paper was included when he expanded and
published the work as The Quintessence of Ibsenism in 1891, and the quote
was specifically written in response to Stead’s attack in the June 1890
Review of Reviews on the feminist Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff. Because
Bashkirtseff believed in herself rather than in sacrificing herself for a man
or her children, Stead insisted that she “was the very antithesis of a true
woman” (Shaw, Quintessence [1891], 36).
Stead led the vehement attacks against the non-sacrificing Katharine
O’Shea that so disturbed Shaw, and which were replicated by other mem-
bers of the press in the Stead spirit. In the December 1890 issue of the
Review of Reviews, Stead wrote of Katharine O’Shea—who in June 1891
married Parnell: “Tall she was, and very fair, . . . and radiant with the beauty
of strength; but in her eye there shone at times an awful light, and those
whom she lured to kiss her by the hearthstone she subsequently devoured”
(qtd. in Robinson, 128). While it is probably unlikely that Stead was ever
close enough to see Katharine O’Shea’s eyes, his fanciful denouncement of
her as a demonic temptress is clearly unfounded and based on his self-
defined sense of absurd morality.19
Similarly, the anti-Parnellite T. M. Healy, whom Margot Gayle Backus
argues began the New Journalism’s propensity for scandal (27–58),
attacked Katharine O’Shea in a speech one month after Parnell’s death as
she was endeavoring to help some of her husband’s followers: “I say no
more shocking incident has been heard of than this alliance between
so-called Irish patriots and a proved British prostitute. I mince no words
in dealing with this matter” (qtd. in Callanan, Parnell, 187).20 Frank
Callanan adds that “the invariable practice in anti-Parnellite rhetoric of
referring to ‘Kitty’ O’Shea was a gesture of calculated disrespect, of

mocking familiarity. Parnell in fact never addressed Katharine as ‘Kitty’”
(Callanan, Healy, 683). Callanan also explains that while in Scotland during
the 1890s “Kitty” was used to designate a “loose woman,” it is not clear if
the use implied the same in Ireland (Callanan, Healy, 683). But presumably
in London it did, and being that Mrs. Warren in Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s
Profession is known as Kitty, it is likely that Shaw was responding to the
derogatory references to Parnell’s partner and wife as “Kitty”—presenting a
real prostitute or a real Kitty, not the woman trapped in a loveless marriage
with Captain O’Shea while in love with the leader of the Irish Party.21
In the following year, 1892, Shaw argued strongly for women’s suffrage
in a London speech, which was a policy he supported consistently. It was
tied to his belief in the legal need for easily accessible divorce, especially for
women (Gibbs, 293). In 1893, in The Philanderer, Shaw blatantly raises the
marriage law and the divorce question. In the play’s original ending, the
worn-out marriage of Paramore and Julia is to be resolved with a divorce, to
be easily obtained not in Britain, but in the American state of South
Dakota—nearly half way around the world from London. This, of course,
echoes Shaw’s second Parnell letter to The Star when he noted that easy and
accessible divorce was possible “in some American States.” The play’s self-
defined philanderer, Charteris, with his various affairs with women, reflects
the Shaw of the early 1890s, but also recalls or satirizes the popular London
view of Parnell—the ultimate philanderer. The name Charteris, of course,
recalls the Chartist movement in Britain led by Irish Feargus O’Connor—
perhaps Parnell’s predecessor for Shaw—of the 1840s who sought to
restructure British society.22 Interestingly, in his December 16, 1890 letter,
quoted in part above, to Jules Magny, Shaw drew connections between the
public’s perception of Parnell and the perceptions of some who knew
himself, Shaw:
I believe opinion is divided between the people who regard me as a saint or a

statue, and those who suspect me of being an Irish Don Juan who will
eventually compromise Socialism by some outrageous scandal of the Parnell
sort. Both opinions are equally romantic. I strenuously object to the marriage
laws as they stand today, and am for granting divorce where both parties
consent to it, on sufficient guarantees being given as to the children &c. I also
object to a family as a legal institution on the ground that the equality of the
wife and child is destroyed by making the husband the unit of the State, with
powers over them which are often grossly abused. (Collected Letters, I, 278.)
Arguably, Shaw saw the philanderers, such as himself and Charteris, and
the populace’s perception of Parnell, as spearheads in the fight against the
then marriage law and Stead’s brand of morality.23
Shaw was not the only one to publicly attack the morality press for its
handling of the Parnell situation; Parnell himself did so in January 1891 in a
speech in Limerick, Ireland, and he singled out Stead: “Stead, and every
miserable old woman in England desirous of airing his virtue had interfered
and expressed his opposition” (qtd. in Callanan, Parnell, 261). In print, the
conservative and Irish-born editor Frank Harris, a staunch unionist against
Irish Home Rule, attacked Stead and the Stead-led morality press for their
persecution of Parnell. In February 1891, in the Fortnightly Review,
Harris—himself in an unhappy marriage with extra-marital affairs—wrote:
“Mr. Stead . . . could be righteousness caricatured—a professional righteous
man: murder [in Whitechapel] excited . . . [and] adultery unmanned him in
hysterical horror and indignation” (qtd. in Pullar, 151). Harris stated that
the press’ sensational condemnation of Parnell “has been probably one of
the most demoralising outbursts ever witnessed in this country; for, whilst
proposing to aim at exhibiting vice as hateful, it has only succeeded in
exhibiting what calls itself virtue as ridiculous” (qtd. in Pullar, 151). Harris,
at the time, was a Conservative MP candidate for South Hackney, but after
publicly supporting Parnell against the moral press, he was forced to with-
draw his candidacy. However, perhaps Harris’ position on the outdated
marriage law helped Shaw to gain the position of theater critic with the
Saturday Review, after Harris purchased and began editing the journal—
despite Harris’ general conservative and anti-Home Rule politics.
In 1908, ten years after Harris had sold the Saturday Review and Shaw
had left its staff, the latter, then an important playwright and public intel-
lectual in London, turned much of his attention to the marriage question
and to the continuous immoral divorce law that was still in effect, in his play
Getting Married. The marriage issue generally was raised in the play on
many fronts at this time, for example politically by leftist journalist Francis
Sheehy-Skeffington’s review of the play’s publication in the March 1911
edition of Irish Review, advocating new divorce laws and women’s rights;
and on a personal level by American novelist Edith Wharton as she contem-
plated ending her unhappy marriage while reading Shaw's play, which
helped shape her novel of a woman trapped in an unhappy relationship,
Ethan Frome.24 Shaw’s campaign on marriage and the rights of women, so
severely restricted within the old marriage laws, provoked national and even
international debate (Schults, 248).
Shaw’s late 1890 hope that Parnell could serve as “a most wholesome
example” against the existing marriage laws began to emerge as a vehicle
toward modernization. In fact, Parnell’s dramatic decline provoked not
only Shaw (through his Ibsen work and plays), but many of Shaw’s Irish
contemporaries (such as [in chronological order] Oscar Wilde, John
Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, St. John
Ervine, Sean O'Casey, James Joyce, and many more) to support modern
and modernizing movements. It was arguably the single most propelling
argument for a literary and political quest for a modern Ireland. Most of the
modernizing Irish writers placed the blame for Parnell’s demise directly on
the Irish Catholic populace that turned against him, especially during the
1891 by-elections, and who protested at Parnell’s campaign appearances by,
for instance, throwing quicklime or a woman’s shift into Parnell’s face. In
his poem “Parnell’s Funeral,” Yeats squarely blamed the Irish (275). Synge
famously mentioned shifts three times in his 1907 The Playboy of the Western
World, the most notable being in Act III, which provoked an audience riot
over morality during the play’s third performance: “It’s Pegeen I’m seeking
only, and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of females, standing in their
shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the Eastern World” (115).25 But the
Parnell fall in 1890–1891, while carried to brutal fruition by the Irish Party
and the Irish populace who voted against Parnell’s by-election candidates,
had its roots in the pure frenzy over morality manufactured by the sensa-
tionalizing London press, especially by the merciless pro-Liberal Party press
that had emerged during the Whitechapel murders in the wake of Stead’s
“Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon” series.
Clearly Gladstone and the Liberal Party had turned against Parnell in
reaction to the morally charged anti-Parnell London press, and the public
frenzy grew from there. Being on the ground in London, Shaw knew this
and, as such, would continue his press letter-writing in order to balance,
even combat, the press and the frenzy it produced. Public hysteria in
1890–1891 had proved very powerful and dangerous, almost totally over-
coming all attempts at rational thought and consideration. Not only had a
charismatic and popular political leader been utterly destroyed for the sake
of an unhealthy pseudo morality, Ireland’s hopes for a peaceful indepen-
dence were, arguably, laid into the dirt of Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery
along with Parnell. As Shaw gravitated towards Ibsen and was moved to
consider the Woman question in 1890–1891 and beyond, Parnell’s fate also
began to nudge the internationalist Shaw toward Home Rule in some form.
On October 16, 1892, Shaw spoke at the Irish National League, a Home
Rule organization formed after the Irish Party split over Parnell (Shaw,
Diaries, II, 862; Gahan, The Return [forthcoming]). Shaw’s efforts for
public reform of the divorce law—and attainment of women’s suffrage—
testify to his role in the early modernizing movement of which his journal-
ism was to become a key component.26
Posterity has revealed that although at the time Shaw’s opinions were not
particularly well received in regard to Parnell, he again highlighted success-
fully the London press’ ability to generate public hysteria as an irrational
alternative to clear thinking. Shaw the journalist was encouraged by his
efforts, but so was Stead. Stead had played a major role in the demise of the
“immoral” Parnell and now he embraced further his morality crusade to
cleanse English and Western society.
MORALITY, DARKEST ENGLAND, CHICAGO,

AND M ILITARIZATION
During the autumn of 1890, a few weeks before the O’Shea divorce court
hearing in November, William Booth, founder and General of the Salvation
Army, published his book In Darkest England and the Way Out. While
Booth was the acknowledged author, Stead had reworked, or completely
rewritten Booth’s original manuscript. As the book drew its title from
Henry Stanley’s recent travel account In Darkest Africa, it, as Stanley
Weintraub notes, “declared that allegedly Christian England was in no
condition to compare itself favorably with the horror and degradation of
central Africa” (Shaw’s People, 56). Weintraub observes that “given” In
Darkest England’s publication in 1890 London, “one might assume that
it was the latest Fabian polemic, perhaps written, as were many of them, by a
musical critic and political activist named Bernard Shaw” (Shaw’s People,
56). Weintraub also suggests that Shaw’s 1905 Major Barbara owes much
of its shape to In Darkest England, the Salvation Army, and General Booth
(Shaw’s People, 61). However, on January 2, 1891, nearly a month after the
sensationalized Parnell scandal split the Irish Party, Stead wrote a letter to
The Star which H. W. Massingham published. Perhaps in an effort to cash in
on his resurging status as the guardian of public morality, Stead wrote that
“Darkest England is not his [General Booth’s] at all, . . . I wrote the book.”27
If Stead wrote General Booth’s book, or was its primary shaper, and
Shaw was influenced by it and the Salvation Army—or rather used them in
some of his writings and plays—Shaw’s interest in Stead’s work remained.
And as David Bowman suggests in “Shaw, Stead and the Undershaft

Tradition,” Shaw’s use of Stead in the writing of Major Barbara went
beyond any affinity for Booth, In Darkest England, and/or the Salvation
Army. Bowman maintains that Stead’s 1900 journalistic book on American
capitalist and steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie, Mr. Carnegie’s Conun-
drum, provided Shaw with the model for the “Undershaft tradition of
Major Barbara, which bars Andrew Undershaft’s children from inheriting
his business and which sets up the plot of finding ‘new blood’ for the
partnership” (30). Stead noted in his book:
Carnegie laid it down as a fundamental principle upon which the partnership

should be conducted that when a partner died his estate should be settled up
within thirty days, and his interest in the business acquired by the remaining
partners, and also that no son or child of any of them should have a share in
the concern or a voice in its management. (qtd. in Bowman, 30)
Bowman also argues that Stead’s Carnegie book pointed the way for
Shaw to connect a Carnegie-like figure to the Salvation Army through
Stead’s comment, “that he [Carnegie] might even become a strong sup-
porter of the social scheme of the Salvation Army” (qtd. in Bowman, 30).
Still, Shaw knew that Carnegie-like capitalists robbed “the poor all the
time” (qtd. in Bowman, 31). Bowman also reveals that Carnegie’s “Gospel
of Wealth is transformed [by Shaw] into Undershaft’s saying that his
religion is being a millionaire” (31). Again, despite Shaw’s views of Stead
and his journalism—and his journalistic and quickly written books—Stead
continued as a presence in Shaw’s work, both journalistic and theatrical.
Still, while he may have seen some use for Carnegie’s and Undershaft’s
millions, Shaw, as Weintraub notes, always remained “skeptical about con-
fessions for bread,” which tied the Salvation Army’s food and washing
provisions to its brand of Christian salvation (Shaw’s People, 69). This, of
course, represented the difference between Shaw and General Booth, and a
fundamental difference between the ideologies of Shaw and the morally
crusading Stead. As Stead, in his Carnegie book, celebrated Carnegie’s
philanthropic efforts in 1900, the more critical Shaw took the Carnegie
example of unimaginable wealth and transformed it to Andrew Undershaft.
This raised for Shaw important questions regarding capitalism and the
constructive use of great accumulated wealth to eradicate severe poverty,
which is portrayed in the factory city created for its workers by Undershaft’s
munitions conglomerate: namely decent working conditions. Shaw, it is
remembered, had not only satirized the Salvation Army for preaching
salvation for the next world in one of his two pseudonymous letters to The
Star during the Whitechapel frenzy, but he had also condemned what he
saw as West End “Blood Money” thrown at Whitechapel poverty without a
concentrated effort to eradicate the underlying causes. The Undershaft
example in Major Barbara provides material life for its workers and their
families—the salvation of workers’ souls is secondary, which Barbara is free
to address at the play’s end. For Shaw, of course, the problem with chari-
table organizations like the ideologically bourgeois Salvation Army was that
they put morality before physical necessity and survival in this world. As
Weintraub astutely points out at the time of General Booth’s In Darkest
England, Shaw had observed: “Booth had almost ceased to make war on
the sources of poverty; rather, he was accepting what amounted to
unacknowledged bribes from other entrepreneurs whose commodities
were counterproductive to social change, to keep the West Ham shelter in
East London, and others like it, alive to dispense soup and salvation”
(Weintraub, Shaw’s People, 68). The Salvation Army’s commitment then
to ending poverty was hypocritical—much like the allegedly moral Stead
who tried to obtain royalties from In Darkest England once the book
became extremely popular, showing himself to be subject to human vices
like anybody else.28
However, if Shaw needed a published source on the severity of poverty
conditions in Whitechapel, he most likely turned not to In Darkest England,
but rather to The Life and Labour of the People of London by shipping line
owner and leather trader turned social researcher Charles Booth
(no relation to General Booth). Booth’s first two volumes were published
in 1889, and consciously considered East London poverty a year after the
Whitechapel murders. In fact, Booth’s published studies provided “the
statistics” for General Booth’s In Darkest England (“The Life and Labour”).
Booth’s volumes (there would be seventeen by 1903) utilized researchers
who included his wife’s cousin Beatrice Potter, who later became Shaw’s
friend Beatrice Webb.29 For Shaw, knowing the extent of East London
poverty would have further trivialized Stead’s morality campaign which
continued to view poverty as a result, or at least indicative, of immorality.
Increasingly, in the post-Parnell years, Stead sought to expand his public
morality crusade, hand in hand with his journalism, onto the international
stage. In 1893, such efforts led Stead to Chicago, a city then wallowing in
excessive crime and vice.
Stead arrived in Chicago on the day the Chicago World’s Fair closed,
when half of the city’s population was unemployed, and with crime, cor-
ruption, and prostitution soaring (Robinson, 218). The city seemed ideal, in
a macabre way, for Stead’s visit as a number of Chicago’s newspaper crime
journalists belonged to a drinking organization, bound together by their
sensational coverage of murders, known as the Whitechapel Club, taking its
name from the Ripper’s killing streets in East London (Larson, 31–32). But
unbeknownst to Stead, and most Chicagoans on his arrival—including the
Whitechapel Club’s journalists—a serial murderer under the name of H. H.
Holmes was active in the city, praying on the many young women who had
come to Chicago seeking opportunity, which the fair provided. Holmes had
started to build his killing dungeon during the Whitechapel murders, and he
remained undetected throughout 1893. Having learned from the Ripper
press coverage that poured into Chicago papers in the autumn of 1888,
Holmes incinerated the bodies of his victims and left little trace of his
killings; as a consequence, the number of women he slaughtered is
unknown (Larson, 70–71). Into this Chicago came Stead, pursuing his
morality crusade for further sensational effect.
While Stead provided copy on Chicago’s morality issues to the Review of
Reviews, Sidney Robinson suggests that a secondary and hypocritical motive
for Stead’s Chicago visit was to meet temperance writer Julia Ames, in
whose company Stead “passed many happy hours discussing sex . . . at the
World Women’s Christian Temperance Union” (217). Stead proposed in
Chicago “that the churches should attempt to put the city’s debauched bars
out of business in a characteristically original fashion—by serving alcohol
themselves” (Robinson, 218). When Stead published his Chicago leaders in
a book, If Christ Came to Chicago in London and Chicago in 1894, he
elaborated on his drink position.30 Stead noted that in Chicago saloons that
were only saloons, and not fronts for debauchery such as gambling dens or
brothels, the saloon patrons and workers were admirable in the manner in
which they attended each other: “In its own imperfect manner this rough,
vulgar, faulty substitute for religion is at least compelling and the tough,
who none of the churches can reach, [gets] to recognize that fundamental
principal of human brotherhood which Christ came to teach” (55).
Stead’s idea of churches or churchmen selling alcohol, or brotherly
saloon-keepers helping their patrons to a salvation more effectively than
churches, would find its way, satirically, into Shaw’s 1909 play, The
Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet. Set in America, the subject matter challenged
the British censor, an institution that adhered to conventional morality. In
the play, the reformed brother of “tough” Blanco Posnet, minister Elder
Daniels, runs a saloon and sees alcohol consumption leading to Christian
salvation.
Shaw’s monitoring of Stead’s journalism from Chicago and elsewhere in
1893 and 1894 would continue when Stead returned to London. But when
Stead’s morality crusade branched into a peace and disarmament crusade,
Shaw was to find himself at times aligned again with Stead, as they had been
in 1888 with the Bryant & May matchstick factory strike. In the early
1890s, Stead quickly developed his Review of Reviews into what Greg
Winston describes as “the preeminent journal of the pacifist movement”
(52). Of course, much of Stead’s early work in disarmament and peace was
in response to the militarism of the European imperialist powers—England,
Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, and Russia—who were engaged in a
relentlessly escalating arms race from the 1880s up to 1914 and the Great
War. The growing irony in this was that Stead’s 1884 “The Truth About
the Navy” series directly contributed to Britain’s involvement in the arms
race at a time when Gladstone’s Liberal government in 1884 had intended
to spend down the Royal Navy. Despite this early contribution, Stead’s
pacifist advocacy expanded into the first decade of the twentieth century
once he returned to London from Chicago. In this regard, the Review of
Reviews became influential and far-reaching, as evidenced by the admiration
for its peace agenda by Dublin socialist, suffrage proponent, nationalist, and
pacifist journalist—and Shaw admirer—Francis Sheehy-Skeffington
(Winston, 52). Even before his Chicago visit, Stead had launched an Amer-
ican edition of the Review of Reviews, which also carried forth his peace
advocacy.
However, as expected, Stead’s pacifist crusade fostered differences
between himself and Shaw. Much of Stead’s peace movement was encour-
aged by his spring 1888 visit to Russia, where he had a brief audience with
Tsar Alexander III and met the author of War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy,
whom Shaw subsequently came to admire and with whom he
corresponded. Stead’s admiration for Alexander III was not affected by
recent exposé reports on Russian Siberian prisons—as in George Kennan’s
1888–1889 serial articles in the American Century Magazine. As mentioned
previously, Shaw provided satirical verse to The Star on Stead’s 1888
Russian visit. Shaw also published a letter on March 11, 1890 in the St
James’s Gazette, then edited by Sidney Low, chastising British politicians,
Liberal, Conservative, and Unionist, for remaining silent on the Russian
political prisoners’ crisis.31 Shaw alluded to published reports on a Russian
woman prisoner slapping a prison governor and then being flogged to

death. Shaw wrote:
As a protest from the influential classes here would put a stop to these
extremities and to the open encouragement of the officials who perpetrate
them, the friends of the [Russian] prisoners not unnaturally now ask whether
we are yet roused to make that protest, and, if not, how many more human
sacrifices we require to bring us up to that point. If the word goes to Siberia
that the English would like to see another woman flogged to death to make
their minds quite easy as to the propriety of passing any remarks on the
subject, there will be no difficulty in finding a Russian exile willing to offer
herself for that purpose. (“Russian Prisoners and English Politicians,” 17–18)
The Russian issue would often be a dividing line between Stead and his
pacifist crusade, and Shaw—which was exasperating for Shaw when many
Londoners came to embrace Stead’s admiration for the last Russian tyrant
Tsar, Nicholas II, who succeeded his father, Alexander III, in 1894. It
would be an admiration with later dire consequences. But in 1894, Shaw
was voicing many of his agendas through his newly formed theater career
and used his play Arms and the Man to satirize the respectable morality
Stead popularized.
STEAD, SHAW, AND A CRUSADE FOR PEACE

Arms and the Man details, without being gruesome, the future conse-
quences of modern militarism if left tied to dangerous and archaic moral
ideals of heroism, stemming from the morality being promoted by Stead
and like-minded popular journalists. The character Major Sergius Saranoff,
prior to the play’s action, led a cavalry charge against modern machine guns.
As the practical Swiss mercenary Bluntchli explains, if the guns had had the
correct ammunition, the cavalry charge would have resulted in a horrible
slaughter, thereby questioning Sergius’ decision—and any officer’s deci-
sion—to adopt such outdated tactics against modern weapons: “was it
professional to throw a regiment of cavalry on a battery of machine guns,
with the dead certainty that if the guns go off not a horse or man will ever
get within forty yards of the fire?” (136). And Sergius and Raina, apostles of
the “higher love” representing the promoted moral romantic and heroic
ideals, are unable to maintain those ideals, which are portrayed as farcical
and cartoon-like (157). They find the ideals tiresome and divorced from
their individual humanity. Sergius’ real lust and emotions are for the servant
Louka, while Raina finds love with Bluntschli—the only man ever to take
her seriously: “I am the first man that has ever taken you quite seriously?”
(174). The play strongly championed non-militarism and disparaged unreal
heroic ideals, hence advocating human and practical peace. The latter is
certainly in evidence by the play’s end when former and recent war adver-
saries forget their antagonism and plan for a practical loving future. Arms
and the Man opened at London’s Avenue Theatre on April 21, 1894 and
performances continued into July—a limited run due to the theater’s
contract.
Nearly a month after the play’s opening, on May 18, Shaw attended a
meeting at Stead’s Review of Reviews offices to discuss the latter’s proposal
for a “National Council to Federate the Moral Forces making for Social
Progress” (Shaw: Diaries, II, 1029). While Shaw provides no particulars of
the meeting in his diary, Stead’s proposal—since it attracted Shaw—was
concerned presumably with Stead’s peace efforts, rather than totally on his
morality crusade. At some point during the meeting, or in the immediate
weeks after the meeting, Stead passed to Shaw a memorial or petition calling
on the Conservative government to sponsor “an international armaments
suspension” (Laurence, “Notes,” Collected Letters, I, 445).
On June 16, 1894, Shaw wrote to Stead returning the memorial signed,
and invited Stead to see a performance of Arms and the Man. Shaw had
asked the Avenue Theatre’s manager, C. T. H. Helmsley, to reserve tickets
for several editors and journalists, but Stead was not among them (Collected
Letters, I, 424). But in his letter to Stead, Shaw wrote of his play: “for the
first time, soldiering has been treated on the stage with some reference to its
reality.” Since it had been four years since Stead had seen the Oberammer-
gau Passion Play—at the time his only experience of theater (Hogan and
Baylen, “Shaw and W. T. Stead, Unexplored,” 128), Shaw stated: “you
must be ripe for a second visit to the theatre by this time.” Then Shaw added
that since he (Shaw) was raised to
believe in Mozart and Beethoven but not in God, I submit with the utmost
docility to your determination to repair the deficiencies in my education on
the theological side; and I think you ought to occasionally try the influence of
art, just to see what it is like. If you were going to preach a sermon on war, I
would come to church to hear you. Why not come to the theatre to hear my
sermon? (Collected Letters, I, 445)
While Stead’s response does not survive, Shaw replied to Stead's reply:
“What a man you are—to talk of making a round of theatres, as if they were
brothels!” (Collected Letters, I, 448).32 Shaw then proposed that Stead
should visit Bayreuth to see Wagner productions, “the most serious attempt
yet made to treat the theatre as a temple” (Collected Letters, I, 448). Shaw
even offered tickets. After Stead apparently accepted, Shaw wrote back on
July 8, “I believe you wont regret it,” and enclosed the tickets and provided
advice on lodgings and travel (Collected Letters, I, 450–451).33 Patrick
Hogan and Joseph Baylen indicate that Stead did not make the trip to
Bayreuth due to concerns over publishing his If Christ Came to Chicago
(“Shaw and W. T. Stead, Unexplored,” 133).
To coincide with the publication of his Chicago book, Stead held a
conference on October 28, 1894, in London’s Queen Hall, titled “If Christ
Came to London,” which Shaw briefly attended. He recorded in his diary,
“I went to the Conference but was so disgusted by Stead’s opening with an
hysterical prayer that I left the hall” (Diaries, II, 1047). In 1922, Shaw
recalled Stead’s conference:
Stead once induced me to support him at a public meeting at Queen’s Hall;

and I attended accordingly, only to find that he did not know what a public
meeting was (he thought it was just like a prayer meeting), or what a public
procedure was, or what a chairman was. Treating the assembly as his congre-
gation and nothing else, he rose and said, “Let us utter one great Damn!”
Then he burst into hysterical prayer; and I left. (qtd. in Whyte, 304)
Clearly Shaw and Stead did not share common ground on moralism, but
perhaps they did on disarmament, or more particularly, peace.34
STEAD, CONAN DOYLE, SHAW, AND PEACE

In late August 1898, Russian Tsar Nicholas II “astonished the world by
proposing an international conference to discuss disarmament and ‘univer-
sal peace’” (Carter, 213). Nicholas had been influenced by Ivan Bloch’s
book, published in Britain as Is War Now Impossible? (Carter, 214). The
book argued not only the “crushing costs of defense spending,” but also
depicted the horrific consequences of a protracted modern European war
with unimaginable casualties and political upheaval. In order to publicize his
proposal throughout Europe, Nicholas II called on the English Stead to
make his case, and allowed Stead three audiences. Rosamund Bartlett
speculates that Stead “seems to have been the only man ever to have
interviewed a Russian Tsar”—and he actually managed two, Alexander III
and Nicholas II (332). On the meetings with Nicholas, Miranda Carter
notes:
The excitable Stead was completely star struck. He gushed about Nicholas’
perceptiveness, his modesty, his disarmament ideas, his desire to be on good
terms with England, his conviction that Queen Victoria was “the greatest
living statesman,” and pronounced himself [Stead] “grateful to God that such
a man sits upon the Russian throne.” (214)35
Following his audiences with Nicholas, Stead undertook a European tour

on his way back to London in order to promote the tsar’s peace initiative.
Back in London, Stead launched his new Peace Crusade in St James’s Hall,
where the speakers included prominent moralists from the anti-Parnell
campaign, Hugh Price Hughes and Revd Clifford (Laity, 146).
In response to Stead’s crusade, Shaw wrote a letter to the Daily Chron-
icle, edited now by Shaw’s friend from The Star, H. W. Massingham. Years
later, journalist and popular newspaper entrepreneur Alfred Harmsworth
(later Lord Northcliffe), recalled that the Daily Chronicle during the 1890s
under Massingham “was the most brilliant and enterprising of all” (qtd. in
Griffiths, 132). Shaw’s letter was published with the header “Trafalgar
Celebration and the Tsar” on October 13, 1898. It effectively captured
the complexities of the period’s public pseudo embracement of Stead’s
crusade. Starting as a reaction to a planned celebration of the 1805 Battle
of Trafalgar, organized by the Navy League, Shaw astutely gauged the
British public as being far too enamored with militarism to accept peace
over war:
Sir,—Are we to understand from the letter of Mr. William Caius Crutchly,

Secretary to the Navy League, that our first response to the Tsar’s pacification
proposal is to be a Trafalgar celebration? No doubt the celebration and
testimonialisation of the remarkable events and eminent men will always be
cherished in England as a means of procuring notoriety for noisy nobodies.
But since peace hath her victories no less than war, I suggest that if the Press is
in the least in earnest in its compliments to the Tsar it should refuse to give
gratuitous advertisements to those specifically obnoxious nobodies who can
find nothing better to celebrate than battles. A celebration of Trafalgar is a
celebration of a French defeat, no less than of an English victory. Suppose the
French, after letting sleeping dogs lie for nearly a century, were suddenly and
without provocation, to begin to celebrate all the Victories they won at that
period, and that all other nations were to follow suit. . . . Can we not go to
Trafalgar-square on the anniversary of the battle and pull down the column
which commemorates it? The Prince of Wales could dislodge the first stone. . . .
By suggesting the dismantling of the Trafalgar column, Shaw was most

definitely at odds with British militaristic patriotism. He then turned to
disarmament as the assurance of peace:
May I add that I do not myself believe in disarmament? Ironclads and Maxims
[machine guns] do not fight: men do. Men fought long before weapons were
invented, and if every weapon in Europe were destroyed tomorrow, we could
have a battle the next day if we wanted to, and a battle much more horrible,
brutal and violent than the scientific massacre which has just happily rid the
Soudan [sic] of its chivalry and heroism. War will come to an end when three
or four Great Powers have become humane enough to determine to have no
more of it, and to police the world to that effect. . . . It is useless for
Englishmen, or any other sort of men, to pretend that their native bravery is
such that modern magazine fire is as invigorating to them as a shower bath. . . .
What we have to aim at, then, is not disarmament, but a combination of
America and the Western Powers to suppress civilised war by internationalised
force of arms, and to dispassionately extirpate barbarous races, whose heroism,
chivalry, patriotism, and religion forbid them to live and let live.
Next, Shaw took aim at the hypocrisy of the popular press that on the one
hand promoted disarmament, while on the other called for imperialistic
military action in some distant and removed land. Shaw sensed correctly
that the popular press was too fond of writing about war and new arma-
ments to uniformly condemn either, as their efforts muddled the populace’s
thinking. Shaw continued by assessing the fondness for war shared by the
popular press and the public alike, despite claims of desiring peace from
both groups:
Unfortunately, these romantic characteristics, especially as displayed in war,

lend themselves to literary and dramatic display; and that is why the Press,
being necessarily literary, will not give them up, and seeks to combine the
most eloquent universal peace with a demand for local bombardment
(in Crete), and the apotheosis of the chivalrous Emirs, “to Iran and to
vengeance true,” with the moral rectitude of the Britons who mowed them
down by machinery.
I plead for a little clear thinking, and—as an inevitable consequence—the

decisive snubbing of the Navy League and its steeplejacks. (“Trafalgar
Celebration,” 51–54)
Clear thinking with regard to countering militarism and its patriotism

was definitely needed, but was lacking in 1898. Shaw had gauged the
growing popularization of Stead’s Peace Crusade, but also the danger of
the hysteria and hypocrisy generated by the popular press that simulta-
neously celebrated military victories and war. He knew the popular press
would promote war over peace when it came to conflict, as war coverage
sold more papers. Shaw’s Daily Chronicle letter reflected a clear grasp of
London society as Stead’s peace movement grew with mostly sentimental
platitudes while militarism continued to strengthen and seduce the same
society. It was as if Shaw could already envision the coming nightmare.
Yet for the moment, Stead’s movement quickly gained organization and
momentum and in January–February 1899, the Crusade sponsored
120 town meetings throughout Britain. Many speakers appeared at the
meetings, such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Shaw. To support his efforts,
Stead launched a new weekly, War Against War: A Chronicle of the Peace
Crusade (Laity, 147). On January 24, four days before the Crusade meeting
in Hindhead, Shaw wrote privately to Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock
Holmes and a would-be popular dramatist, suggesting that the scheduled
speakers agree “about the resolutions to be moved on Saturday.” Shaw
warned that
If we don’t, we shall find ourselves landed with a string of rubbish about

disarmament, truces of God, and the like, devised by Stead, and profoundly
disbelieved in by all of us. . . . I strongly object to making Queensberry rules
for war: what I do believe in is a combination of the leading powers to police
the world and put down international war just as private war is put down. . . .
The speakers ought to meet and settle what they mean to support. (Shaw,
Collected Letters, II, 73)
It is unclear if the speakers met privately before the 24th, as Conan Doyle
spoke at the Crusade meeting praising Nicholas II’s disarmament proposal
and conference. Conan Doyle recorded: “I thought to myself as I spied
Shaw in a corner of the room: ‘this time at any rate he must be in sympa-
thy.’” However, once Conan Doyle was finished, Shaw “sprang to his feet
and put forward a number of ingenious reasons why these proposals for
peace would be disastrous” (qtd. in Conan Doyle Letters, 413). Shaw

reiterated his views against disarmament as the means to achieve peace, as
well as his proposal for a unity of the major powers against war, essentially
reiterating the views expressed in his October 13, 1898 letter in The Daily
Chronicle.
Patrick Hogan and Joseph Baylen indicate in “Shaw, W. T. Stead, and the
‘International Peace Crusade’ 1890–1899,” that Stead reported some remarks
by Shaw from the meeting War Against War within days of the Hindhead
meeting: “the great danger was . . . insincerity. All the statesmen . . . , the very
men who were ordering torpedo boats were expressing approval of the Tsar’s
Rescript. . . . No good would be done by repeating the platitudes which
we put on our Christmas cards every year” (qtd. in Hogan and Baylen,
60–61). Shaw’s tact, of course, went against the peace platitudes expressed
by the popular London press, but which had little real substance in their
sentiments—much like the politicians who spoke of peace but approved more
funds for armaments. Shaw’s stance in 1899 anticipated his journalistic
reactions to the Great War. And as Shaw had anticipated in his Daily Chron-
icle letter, the Hague peace conference in May 1899—the result of Nicholas
II’s 1898 call for a disarmament meeting of the great powers and Stead’s
efforts—resulted in little. Miranda Carter writes: “All the major European
nations and America felt obliged to send delegations to the Hague confer-
ence, but most of the government delegates were pro-war and the proposals
were endlessly watered down. Disarmament disappeared from the agenda,
and the modest suggestion to freeze arms levels was almost universally
opposed” (215). Even Nicholas’ “enthusiasm had waned” prior to the
conference. Months later, Britain was at war in South Africa and Russian
troops were sent to Manchuria (Carter, 215). Europeans and Americans in
1899 were being seduced by the growing militarism and the morally pure
ideals of heroism, which could lead only in one direction.
Britain’s participation in the South African Boer War of 1899–1902
resulted in a loss of popularity for Stead, whose publications publicly and
vehemently opposed the war; his stance cost him and his Review of Reviews
much revenue. Similarly, Massingham opposed the war in the Daily Chron-
icle until he was removed as editor. The brutal Boer War, of course, proved
Shaw was correct with regard to public platitudes for disarmament as British
imperialistic patriotic jingoism carried the day. However, Shaw’s position
on the Boer War leaned more toward the British war effort as “the lessor of
two evils.” He endeavored to persuade the Fabian Society to attempt to
influence the government’s colonial policies within South Africa and check
the wanton capitalist strategies he suspected would develop in the region

(Gibbs, 241).
By the time the Boer War ended, Shaw had made some progress as a
dramatist, which continued significantly through the first decade of the
twentieth century—particularly as Man and Superman, John Bull’s Other
Island, and Major Barbara were performed by the Verdenne-Barker man-
agement at London’s Court Theatre, with extensive tours. With such
success added to his 1898 marriage to wealthy Charlotte Payne-Townsend,
Shaw no longer needed a steady income from journalism, but continued his
journalistic letters to the press. His press letters were now mostly signed. He
was, by the early years of the twentieth century, a recognized social voice
and critic, and could employ his growing reputation in the causes he
addressed in his letters. His letters, of course, enhanced his role as a public
intellectual who saw his duty to comment in the press when needed. Also,
by 1902 Shaw had expanded his journalistic letters to regularly writing to
the establishment’s Times. In 1904 he wrote a series of letters to the paper
against the archaic and barbaric use of flogging in the British Navy as a
disciplinary punishment. Specifically, Shaw was responding to the recent
Navy flogging of a young boy in service. Shaw’s flogging letters were
eventually challenged by a naval officer, Vice Admiral C. C. Penrose-
Fitzgerald, who tried to dismiss Shaw and his like as cranks. Shaw’s response
of October 11, 1904 in The Times included the following:
Imprisonment is much crueler . . . . But cruel as it is, it is at least free from the
taint of corrupt passion. It does not gratify even the vilest of us to look at
Pentonville Prison. When the police raid a disorderly house [a brothel] they
never find there the convict cell and the tin of skilly [gruel]. They always find
the implements of the ship’s corporal. (“Flogging in the Navy,” 42)
Shaw had most likely remembered Stead’s 1885 leader on a blood-and-

flesh flogging within a London brothel. Whether responding to major or
less pressing social issues, Shaw’s continued press letters endeavored to
provoke “clear thinking,” as the arguments for continued flogging and
other issues failed to stand up to his reasoned and rational responses.
Shaw’s press views were now being heard, and even heeded. His journalism
was progressing as part of a modernizing process that provoked thoughtful
consideration, advocating the real and eventual choices that would have to
be made. British society finally decided that flogging a sailor on a navy
warship did not instill discipline and did nothing to improve morale or
produce a more effective sailor.
In the years immediately following his 1904 flogging letters, Shaw would
be drawn to voice his opinions on several important national and interna-
tional issues. Among others, in 1905 he provided a rational response to the
Russian Revolution that resulted in high numbers of slaughtered Russians in
St Petersburg. In 1909, four years after the Liberal Party returned to power
(a party Shaw had questioned many times in his journalism), he was com-
pelled to comment on both the government’s foreign policy and the Stead-
inspired fascination with the autocratic Russian Tsar Nicholas II. By 1912
Shaw was demonstrating a journalistic brilliance that matched his by now
impressive public reputation. When he believed that the British Empire’s
dominance of the sea—and world—was being jeopardized by sensational-
izing and lying journalism, he stepped forward again, poised to respond
even though doing so meant he endangered his popularity. And when this
came together in 1912, Stead was there, and so was the barrister who had
prosecuted the translator Henry Vizetelly in November 1888 for publishing
Emile Zola’s “immoral” literature, who now was the Liberal Prime Minis-
ter, Herbert Asquith. The world was becoming more complicated and with
modernizing came desperate efforts to hold on to old values. Shaw’s jour-
nalism would be needed more than ever before.
NOTES
1. Stead would recall this assurance from Davitt in “The Story of an
Incident in the Home Rule Cause,” Review of Reviews (December
1890), 600.
2. Five years prior to the O’Shea divorce case, a Liberal MP named
Charles Dilke was embroiled in a publicized scandal that ruined his
career. Margot Gayle Backus details that Dilke, once an ally of
Liberal MP Joseph Chamberlain, had visited Ireland in order to
promote the feasibility of an Irish program of using the Catholic
Church to expand local government. But on returning to London,
Dilke abandoned the plan in favor of Home Rule. An angered
Chamberlain, Backus suggests, orchestrated a scandal involving
Dilke and a Mrs. Crawford, the wife of another MP, even though
Dilke barely knew Mrs. Crawford. When Donald Crawford filed a
divorce suit against his wife, Dilke was named as co-respondent.
During the trial, Mrs. Crawford testified to an affair with Dilke,
and claimed he had taught her “‘every French vice’” (qtd. in Rob-
inson, 118). Seemingly, she did so to protect her real lover whom
Chamberlain apparently knew of. “Stead responded to Dilke’s pur-
ported ‘Franco-eroticism’ by obsessively denouncing ‘the horrors of
“unnatural” male desire’” (Backus, 75). “French” classification in
the late nineteenth century in the context of sexual activity and
brothels meant oral sex, including between women (Zacks,
20–21). Mrs. Crawford testified to having engaged in a ménage a
trois with Dilke and a “housemaid”—suggesting to a moral and
righteous population, her depravity and lack of shame at crossing
class divisions (Backus, 75). Dilke’s career was destroyed by the
press’ sensationalizing. The blood of editors, such as the morally
obsessed—and sexually obsessed—Stead, was up.
3. James Munro, Head of Detective Services under Home Secretary
Matthews during the Whitechapel murders, had worked on Irish
Fenian violence in Britain, and was therefore a possible witness to the
Parnell Commission. Lord Salisbury, the Conservative prime minis-
ter in 1888, had agreed to the commission in an effort to discredit
Parnell and the Irish Party.
4. On February 19, 1889, after Piggot testified to the Parnell Com-
mission, Shaw published a leader on Piggot in The Star, “The Parnell
Forger.” Shaw recalled his boyhood years in Dalkey, where Piggot
was “attached as amateur photographer” and known as “the Major”
due to his single eyeglass in which he frequently spied Killiney Bay
(28). Shaw offers his recollection as an alternative to the older and
contemptible figure that Piggot had become due to his testimony as
the obtainer of the incriminating Parnell letters and their apparent
forger. Soon after his testimony, Piggot confessed the forgery. Days
later he committed suicide.
5. www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/nov/18/2.
6. See Chapter 1, note 39.
7. Oscar Wilde had also dealt with the idea of the secret life separate
from conventional life in his 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Grey,
published, obviously, in the same year the O’Shea divorce went to
court. Another aspect of the secret life, or the notion of living two
lives was echoed, or anticipated in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—even more so in the
melodrama play based on the novel that played London by the
American actor Richard Mansfield during the summer and early
fall of 1888—the early weeks of the Whitechapel murders (Worsley,

188–193). The public’s willingness to see the Ripper murders
reflected in Mansfield’s performances forced the production to end
its run, despite its enormous popularity in August before the London
press sensationalized the early murders. Stead, in the Pall Mall
Gazette, eventually drew connections between Mansfield’s perfor-
mance and the murderer in a leader, “Mr. Hyde at large in White-
chapel” (qtd. in Worsley, 193). The public’s self-righteous sense of
the secret life was decidedly slanted toward what it saw as deviant
and debased, which was encouraged by the Whitechapel murders.
To be portrayed by the popular press as having a the secret life was
deadly for any politician or public figure in 1890–1891 London—
and as Parnell experienced, especially in the case of an Irish
politician.
8. Dublin’s Leinster Hall was on Hawkins Street and had been opened
in 1886 on the site of Dublin’s first Theatre Royal, which had
subsequently burned down. In the 1890s, the Leinster was
redesigned as the second Theatre Royal.
9. In remembering W. T. Stead in 1912, Revd Clifford wrote: “To me
he was a prophet who had come from straight out of the Old
Testament into our storm-swept life” (www.attackingthedevil.co.
uk/peers/miscellaneous.php).
10. G. K. Chesterton would enter into a press debate with John Clifford
in 1902, when Clifford led, outside of Parliament, the nonconform-
ist opposition to the then submitted Education Bill. Clifford’s objec-
tion to the Bill was due to his apparent belief that it would benefit
the expansion of Catholicism in Britain. Chesterton disagreed
(Ffinch, 103).
11. The existing divorce law in 1890 was the Matrimonial Causes Act of
1857. It allowed divorces to be dealt with in a civil and secular court,
but it was not a modern law. Husbands could divorce by proving a
wife’s adultery. A wife could also divorce, but she had to prove the
husband’s adultery and a second charge: excessive cruelty to the
wife, desertion, or incest (http://www.perfar.eu/policies/matrimo
nial-causes-act-1857).
12. Gladstone’s sexual morality was a complicated issue as he balanced
his deep religious beliefs with his need to be exposed to temptation
in order to resist it. Gladstone frequently spoke to East London
prostitutes, reportedly in an effort to reform them, but as Trevor
Fisher suggests, it was probably an exercise in being tempted by the

prostitutes in order to then turn away from acting on the physical
temptation. Gladstone’s sense of marriage, particularly its religious
sacraments, was strong—at least for Gladstone publicly. He believed
the marriage sacraments had to be upheld no matter what (Trevor
Fisher, “Sex and Mr. Gladstone,” www.historytoday.com/trevor-
fisher/sex-and-mr-gladstone).
13. Shaw’s statement “that the character of these reformers cannot be
cut in two halves” refuted Annie Besant’s recent article on the
Parnell case. In a letter to E. D. Girdlestone on his second Parnell
letter to The Star, Shaw stated that he included “an utter demolition
of Mrs. Besant’s absurd argument about cutting a man in two
halves” (Collected Letters, I, 274).
14. Frederic Harrison was among the leader writers attacking Parnell
over the divorce scandal, such as: “a man who is made a public
laughing-stock cannot be a leader of men, even if he were an
angel” (“The Irish Leadership,” Fortnightly Review, January
1, 1891, 123).
15. In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, when Jack Wor-
thing is asked in Act I by Lady Bracknell what his politics are, he
responds: “Well, I am afraid I really have none. I am a Liberal
Unionist.” Bracknell replies with: “Oh, they count as Tories. They
dine with us. Or come in the evening, at any rate” (46–47).
16. Perhaps as a testament to his role behind the Parnell vote leading up
to December 5, Archbishop Walsh of Dublin was kept apprised of
developments against the Protestant Parnell by MP William Martin
Murphy. On the eve of what became the five days of debate, Murphy
wrote to Walsh on his expectation that Parnell would be ousted from
leadership: “I am all through satisfied since the issue of
Mr. Gladstone’s letter and the discovery of the trick played upon
us on Tuesday last” (qtd. in Callanan, Parnell, 15). The trick
referred to was the indication before the party vote on November
25 that if re-elected, Parnell would step down. He was re-elected but
refused to step down. Murphy would gain notoriety during the
1913 Dublin Lockout as a major Dublin capitalist and employer of
labor, and leader of the Dublin Employers Federation in the Lock-
out against workers in the Irish Transport and General Workers’
Union (ITGWU) and sympathizing unions. From a labor or socialist
view, Murphy was ruthless against the ITGWU’s workers. Shaw
responded to Murphy during the Lockout in a speech he delivered
on behalf of Dublin labor and the ITGWU’s then imprisoned leader,

James Larkin, on November 1, 1913. See Shaw, Synge, Connolly,
and Socialist Provocation.
17. Shaw added a postscript to his December 16, 1890 letter to Olivier:
“I may add that I write under the influence of a strong feeling that
we are heavily responsible for the utter damnation of H. W. M
[assingham], . . . . We encouraged H. W. M. to temporize when
he should have walked out with his soul alive, merely because it was
convenient for us to get a par. [paragraph] in the Star occasionally”
(Collected Letters, I, 277). As The Star’s editor under the paper’s
Liberal backers, Massingham had been pulled into the Parnell case
and attacks. However, he was ousted as The Star’s editor in January
1891 over disagreements with the paper’s shareholders.
18. Greg Winston makes a compelling argument in Joyce and Militarism
that throughout his life James Joyce’s fiction was almost exclusively a
reaction to Irish and European militarism, as shaped by its morally-
fueled heroism.
19. Stead’s fanciful depiction of Katharine O’Shea luring and kissing
men “by the hearthstone” seemingly draws on the Irish myth of
Kathleen ni Houlihan who attempts to draw in Irishmen to fight for
her, the embodiment of Ireland. Stead’s seeming use of the Kathleen
myth, even though Katharine O’Shea was American rather than
Irish (something Stead may not have known), especially anticipates
William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory’s treatment of the myth in
their 1902 play Kathleen Ni Houlihan. In the play Kathleen seduces
the young Michael Gillane, not for lurid sex, but to the cause of Irish
independence. This is a curious connection, especially given that
Yeats and Gregory’s Kathleen is portrayed as morally pure, despite
all who have loved her.
20. As perhaps a sign of the growth of decades, T. M. Healy served as the
legal counsel for Ethel Bishop in Dublin in 1909, who was sued for
divorce by her husband on the grounds of adultery. Divorce in
Ireland, at the time, was not legal, but the divorce suit was still filed.
The Archbishop of Dublin, William Walsh, tried to steer the Dublin
press away from covering the trial (http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.
com/2009/02/sex-scandal-archbishop-failed-to-censor.html). It is
interesting that Healy could take such a case, given his late 1890
opposition to Parnell.
21. On the eve of his marriage to Katharine O’Shea (once her divorce
from O’Shea was final) on June 25, 1891, Parnell published a letter
to his secretary’s solicitor during a libel trial his secretary, Henry
Campbell, had brought against the Cork Daily Herald for stating
that Campbell had hired the houses where Parnell and Katharine
met. In his letter, Parnell attempted to defend Katharine stating that
she had served as his “intermediary” in past dealings with Gladstone,
and had played an important role for Ireland’s Home Rule effort
(Callanan, Parnell, 124).
22. Like Shaw, Feargus O’Connor’s family background was of the
Church of Ireland.
23. By the time of the Parnell scandal, Shaw had for a number of years
publicly opposed the then marriage law. In his review of Marie
Corelli’s novel Vendetta in the September 11, 1886 Pall Mall
Gazette, Shaw wrote: “Our simple rule of not marrying such
women, or, if we may then unawares, untying the knot and quitting
them, seems as sordid to him [the novel’s character Count Fabio] as
his wounded vanity and lust for vengeance seem puerile to us. His
opinion will nevertheless find friends in England. We have always
with us men and women who, born after their due time, clamour to
have the clock put back, and would, if they might have their way,
reinstate flogging, dueling, confiscation of the property of wives, and
a dozen other barbarisms which the rest of us have outgrown”
(“Vendetta,” in Bernard Shaw’s Book Reviews, Vol. I, ed. Bryan
Tyson, College Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2008,
188–192).
24. Edith Wharton made notations in the margins of the Preface in her
copy of Shaw’s play, Getting Married that specifically resonated with
her on divorce (Lee, 366). She particularly noted Shaw’s passage:
“There is no magic in marriage. If there was, married couples would
never desire to separate. But they do. And when they do, it is simple
slavery to compel them to remain together . . . Grant divorce at the
request of either party, whether the other consents or not; and admit
no other ground than the request, which should be made without
stating any reasons” (qtd. in Lee, 367). Wharton’s reading and
noting of Shaw’s play and Preface were undertaken during the last
year of her marriage (Lee, 366). To read the Irish leftist response to
Getting Married’s Preface, see the author’s Shaw, Synge, Connolly,
and Socialist Provocation.
25. Reportedly, actor William Fay, who portrayed Christy Mahon (who
speaks the third shift line in Act III) during the play’s January 1907
premier run, substituted “Mayo” for “chosen” (Saddlemyer,
“Stormy,” 273). Synge’s first play, In the Shadow of the Glen, in
1903, also projected a marital separation theme—with the theme
also appearing in Synge’s The Tinker’s Wedding (1903), The Well of
Saints (1905), and in his unfinished Deirdre of the Sorrows that
premiered in 1910.
26. Arguably, some of Shaw’s contemporaries, Irish writers who
responded against the Parnell press frenzy, sought reform of the
Woman and divorce issues as a way of modernizing Ireland. Audrey
McNamara (in a forthcoming work) argues that Shaw eventually
turned some of his efforts for women’s rights toward modernizing
Ireland.
27. www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/letters/Star.php. Eight days after his
letter on In Darkest England’s authorship, Stead wrote to Revd
C. F. Aked and claimed that Booth wrote the book, and he
(Stead) did the “hack-work” (www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/let
ters/genown.php). Stead’s recent biographer W. Sidney Robinson
notes that Stead wrote most of the book as it bears Stead’s sensa-
tional journalistic style throughout (175–178).
28. On January 9, 1891, Stead wrote to General Booth after In Darkest
England began selling exceedingly well and suggested that “the
public will be, rightly or wrongly, surprised, to use no stronger
term, if the profits accruing from the sale of a book” are not shared
with himself (qtd. in Robinson, 178).
29. Charles Booth online archive at http://booth.lse.ac.uk/.
30. Stead’s If Christ Came to Chicago proved very popular in its Amer-
ican version, which included a map of Chicago that indicated where
every brothel, with their names, were located. Undoubtedly, the
maps served more as guides to the brothels, than exposing the
locations of sin.
31. Shaw’s Russian letter to the St. James’s Gazette followed a “Russian
Martyrs” demonstration in London’s Hyde Park on March 9, 1890
(Laurence and Rambeau, “Notes,” 17).
32. Shaw was well aware of Stead’s investigative brothel visits.
33. Shaw then ended his July 8, 1894 letter to Stead by revealing that
since Edmund Yates had recently died, he was leaving The World and
his music criticisms: “Next winter the greatest music critic in Europe
will be silent . . . unless he gets an extremely handsome inducement

to go on” (Collected Letters, I, 451). Perhaps the Bayreuth invitation
was in hopes of moving his music criticism to the monthly Review of
Reviews. Patrick Hogan and Joseph Baylen argue that Shaw’s Bay-
reuth invitation to Stead was to “gain the support of the Review of
Reviews in surmounting English prejudice against Wagner” (“Shaw
and W. T. Stead, Unexplored,” 131).
34. Interestingly, in 1895 W. T. Stead defended Oscar Wilde after
Wilde’s prosecution (Robinson, 225).
35. Miranda Carter perceptively reminds us that 1898 was also the year
that Shaw’s friend, H. G. Wells, “published the mother of all
invasion-scare novels, The War of the Worlds” (214).
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2013.
Bartlett, Rosamund. Tolstoy: A Russian Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
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1971. 29–32.
Callanan, Frank. The Parnell Split: 1890–91. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
1992.
. . . T. M. Healy. Cork: Cork University Press, 1996.
Carter, Miranda. George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to
World War I. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.
Clifford, Reverend John. “Stead.” www.attackingthedeveil.co.uk/
peersmiscellaneous.php (accessed August 12, 2014).
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Stashover, and Charles Foley, ed. New York: Penguin, 2007.
Dungan, Myles. The Captain and the King: William O’Shea, Parnell and Late
Victorian Ireland. Dublin: New Island, 2009.
Ffinch, Michael. G. K. Chesterton. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.
Fisher, Trevor. “Sex and Mr. Gladstone.” www.history today.com/trevor-fisher/
sex-and-mr-gladstone
Gahan, Peter. The Return (forthcoming).
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Griffiths, Dennis. Fleet Street: Five Hundred Years of the Press. London: The British
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Harrison, Frederic. “The Irish Leadership,” Fortnightly Review, January 1, 1891.

123.
Havighurst, Alfred F. Radical Journalist H. W. Massingham (1860–1924). Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
Hogan, Patrick and Joseph Baylen. “G. Bernard Shaw and W. T. Stead: An
Unexplored Relationship.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900. Autumn
1961. 123–147.
. . . “Shaw, W. T. Stead, and the ‘International Peace Crusade’ 1890–1899.” The
Shaw Review. May 1963, 60–61.
Jackson, Alvin. Home Rule: An Irish History 1800–2000. London: Weidenfield and
Nicolson, 2003.
Laity, Paul. The British Peace Movement. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001.
Larson, Erik. Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that
Changed America. New York: Vintage, 2004.
Laurence, Dan H. “Notes.” Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters 1874–1897, Volume I,
to the Press 1875–1950. Dan H. Laurence and James Rambeau, ed., 12–13.
Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. New York: Vintage, 2008.
“Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857.” www.historytoday.com/trevor-fisher/sex-and-
mr-gladstone (accessed July 22, 2014).
Morrissey, Thomas Jr., SJ. William Walsh: Archbishop of Dublin, 1841–1921. Dub-
lin: Four Courts Press, 2000.
“The O’Shea-Parnell divorce case.” www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/
nov/18/2 (accessed July 16, 2014).
Pullar, Phillippa. Frank Harris. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.
Saddlemyer, Ann. “A Stormy Aftermath.” The Collected Letters of John Millington
Synge, Volume I, 1871–1907. Ann Saddlemyer, ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985.
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Shaw, George Bernard. Arms and the Man. Bernard Shaw: Complete Plays with
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. . . Bernard Shaw: The Diaries 1885-1897, Volume II. Stanely Weintraub,

ed. College Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1986.
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CHAPTER 4
Stead, Russia, and Titanic
In 1901, as Shaw was moving away from regular journalism for employ-
ment, he was interviewed by Frank Harris over two issues in May of Harris’
new journal, Candid Friend. The journalistic use of interviews was popu-
larized by W. T. Stead during his years as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in
the 1880s (Schults, 254–255). Shaw too employed interviews on occasions
when submitting letters to newspapers—even as early as November 1892 in
The Star as Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses was about to premier (Weintraub,
Shaw’s People, 41). Sometimes Shaw was interviewed by editors or leader
writers, like Harris in 1901. At other times, Shaw used the interview form by
writing and submitting a self-interview in which he posed questions to
himself as if they came from a reporter—as in “Special Interviews” which
Shaw submitted and published in Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal and The
Evening Telegraph on October 3, 1910 to promote his Dublin lecture,
“The Poor Law and Destitution in Ireland.” Harris’ 1901 interview with
Shaw was titled “Who I Am, and What I Think.” In the second installment,
Shaw responded to Harris’ question about the profession 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. There is an indescribable levity—not triviality,
mind, but levity—something spritelike about the final truth of a matter: and
this exquisite levity communicates itself to the style of the writer who will face

Journalism, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49007-6_4
the labour of digging down to it. . . . 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
effect, was an apprenticeship which made me master of my own style.
(“Shaw’s Verdict on Journalism,” Shaw: Interviews and Recollections, 95–96).
Of course, Shaw saw his reviewing work for the Pall Mall Gazette, The Star,
The World, and The Saturday Review as part of his journalism, but that
journalism also included his paid paragraphs for The Star and other papers
well into the 1890s. And as master of his own style, Shaw had, by the early
twentieth century, settled his journalistic work into signed letters to the
press on issues and topics that compelled him to respond in the immediate.
Of course, becoming master of his style propelled him as a dramatist as well,
where he too strove to “get to the bottom of everything” (“Shaw’s Verdict
on Journalism,” Shaw: Interviews and Recollections, 96).
In contrast to Shaw, Stead was not as fortunate on the journalistic front at
this time—despite having created and generated sensational shock journal-
ism during the 1880s that remained the popular journalistic style. Shaw
recalled in 1922 that Stead’s overall journalism was unable to generate
“anything wider and deeper than a journalistic stunt” (qtd. in Whyte,
304). Arguably, Stead’s hurried books on “hot” topics were among such
stunts, but they neither achieved the popularity he sought nor provided the
wealth he would have liked. They may have, as journalistic-type books,
served as a model for Shaw’s impulse to write his own journalistic books,
starting with The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Of course, journalistic books
allowed both Stead and Shaw a wider canvas to carry their assertions and
agendas far beyond mere daily or weekly leaders.
During the Boer War, due to his very public anti-war stance, Stead saw
his Review of Reviews suffer greatly in circulation. By 1904, Stead was again
set on returning to a daily newspaper and resurrected the Daily Paper,
which had failed miserably in the early 1890s. Once again Stead wanted
his new paper to serve “as the nerve centre for the collection and distribu-
tion of news . . . for the inspiration, direction and organization of the moral,
social, political and intellectual forces of the whole community” (qtd. in
Robinson, 245). Shaw recalled, also in 1922, that Stead’s “secretary wrote
to me as one of his old reviewing staff [from their Pall Mall Gazette days],
and informed me that she proposed to send me a batch of books for review
on the old terms (two guineas a thousand [pages]) precisely as if I were a
young journalist still in my thirties. And he himself resumed his articles on
STEAD, RUSSIA, AND TITANIC 105
Home Rule just where they had left off in the ‘eighties’”—articles that had
been stifled by the Parnell scandal Stead had done so much to inflame (qtd.
in Whyte, 305).1 Stead’s 1904 Daily Paper failed and was bankrupt within
five weeks of its first issue, which propelled Stead into a “massive nervous
breakdown” (Robinson, 245). Shaw, again recalling in 1922, noted that
“the daily paper fiasco disposed of Stead’s imaginary reputation as an
editor” (qtd. in Whyte, 305). However, in his efforts to recover from the
Daily Paper failure, and perhaps to recapture some public attention, Stead
began attending the theater, which he announced in the July Review of
Reviews as “First Impressions of the Theatre.”
Shaw responded to Stead’s theater-going announcement by writing
privately to him: “As a playgoer of nearly forty years’ standing, a playwright,
and a practiced critic of the theatre, I have read your maiden effort
[at theater review] with many chuckles.” Shaw added, “Your question ‘Is
the Theatre a power making for righteousness?’ is as useless as the same
question would be about Religion or Gravitation or Government or Music”
(Collected Letters, II, 427–428). Further on in his letter, Shaw took issue
with Stead’s discussion of what he called “immoral actresses”:
What do you mean, you foolish William Stead, by an immoral actress? I will
take you into any church you like, and shew [sic] you gross women who are
visibly gorged with every kind of excess, with coarse voices and bloated
features, to whom money means unrestrained gluttony and marriage unre-
strained sensuality, but whose characters—whose “purity” as you call it—
neither you nor their pastors dare level a rebuke.
Shaw added that he could take Stead to the theater and show him hard-
working, dedicated actresses who “do not allow their personal relations to
be regulated by your gratuitously unnatural and vicious English marriage
laws” but who are not routinely to be viewed as immoral (Collected Letters,
II, 429). The letter represented a private moment in which Shaw challenged
Stead’s absurd sense of morality regarding working women, specifically the
New Woman as actor, that Stead had propagated for decades. Unperturbed
by Shaw’s letter, Stead continued to attend theater and publish his various
reviews—including one in January 1906 of Shaw’s Major Barbara (1905).
Stead, who particularly favored Act II (Shaw, Collected Letters, II, 599),
wrote: “Major Barbara deserves a cordial welcome from all who desire to see
the stage rescued from the degradation into which it has been dragged by
those who regard a play as a mere spectacle at the best or an aphrodisiac at
the worst” (qtd. in Hogan and Baylen, “Shaw and W. T. Stead,

Unexplored,” 141).2 It is not known whether Stead was able to recognize
his presence, via his book on Andrew Carnegie and his work on In Darkest
England, in Major Barbara. But with regard to journalism, rather than
theater criticism, Stead’s path would cross Shaw’s view again—with Shaw
eventually drawn to the monstrous sensationalized press-generated public
hysteria to which Stead had a ticket.
RUSSIA’S BLOODY SUNDAY, REVOLUTION, AND STEAD

On January 9, 1905, impoverished Russian workers and their families
marched to the tsar’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg with large Russian
Orthodox icons “to present a petition of social grievances and desires to
Nicholas II.” When they failed to cease and dissipate, the tsar’s troops who
had amassed in a line formation in front of the palace opened fire. “Hun-
dreds were wounded and killed” (Steinberg and Khrustalev, 344–345). The
day, reminiscent but worse than London’s 1887 Bloody Sunday in Trafalgar
Square, became known as Russia’s Bloody Sunday, and this time Shaw
responded to the Russian crisis before Stead. On February 1, Shaw spoke
at a meeting of the Society of the Friends of Russian Freeedom (Soboleva
and Wrenn, 32). The Times reported on Shaw’s words:
Mr. Shaw said the strikers [Russian protestors] made a very great mistake in
going unarmed to oppose the State. If they oppose the State the State would
shoot them, and until all the working-class populations of the world under-
stood thoroughly that when they stirred out of their ordinary round to oppose
the State they must do it with arms in their hands or it would be understood
that none of them really meant business. He was not there to make a protest
against the butchery and to sympathise with the victims. He was there to
sympathise with the revolution. (“The Crisis in Russia,” The Times (February
2, 1905), qtd. in Soboleva and Wrenn, 113)
Shaw’s comment on the working class arming themselves would be

repeated in a London speech on November 1, 1913 during the Dublin
Lockout. In addressing police attacks against locked out Dublin workers,
Shaw stated “that all respectable men will have to arm themselves” (“Mad
Dogs,” 97).3 Shaw’s sense of what would be needed for real social and
political revolution, in Russia and later in Dublin, projected in 1905 an
astute view of the Russian and international working-class situation, which
was more dire than usual in Russia given the early and disastrous defeats
Russia suffered at the hands of Japan during the Russo-Japanese War
(1904–1905). On February 4, 1905, Shaw’s letter to The Star, then
under the editorship of his old friend Ernest Parke, was published in order
to clarify his recent Russian comments:
Sir,—Some person, presumably a Russian police-agent, has entrapped two

London newspapers into stating that I “introduced myself as a Nihilst” at the
meeting in Queen’s Hall on the 1st instant.4 As your paper is one of the
victims, will you be so good as to give publicity to my flat contradiction of this
most impudent report?
Nihilism, with its interesting personalities, its literary turn, its long roll of
martyrs and self-sacrifices, and its occasional picturesquely explosive murders,
no doubt appeals strongly to the romantic imagination of the English middle-
classes. I have no sympathy whatever with it. Any fool can be a martyr; any
enthusiastic girl student can be driven to self-sacrifice by the apparent hope-
lessness of sensible and effective action. It is a crime to encourage such wanton
suicide by admiring and applauding it. If the people of Russia want self-
sacrifice, the existing order seems to me to afford them all the opportunities
they can reasonably desire; and a revolution is (in that case) uncalled for. My
own political philosophy is that of the Tsar and the Grand Dukes, though I
happen to differ with them as to the most desirable form of government. I
quite agree with them that it is their business to sacrifice, not themselves, but
their opponents. I agree with them that to deliver over their country without a
struggle to Nihilism would be a crime, and to trust to a mob unintelligent
enough to attempt to vanquish troops by waving icons at them a folly.
The revolution in Russia has clearly to fight the Tsar; and the Tsar, as a
gentleman and an autocrat, has to fight the revolution, whether he likes it or
not. The sooner the revolution faces that fact, and gives up the study of
Turgenieff’s novels [with romantic self-sacrifices], and the really dastardly
notion that it is heroic to get college lasses and lads into ruinous trouble as
romantic conspirators, the sooner Russia will get a more liberal constitution.5
It is clearly England’s business to show her sympathy with the revolution,
unless, indeed, we are on the side of autocracy against our own system, in
which case we had better change it.6 It is just as proper for an Englishman to
send money to the revolutionists to buy cartridges as it was to send it to Count
Tolstoy to buy loaves in the days of the Russian famine.7 And, if it were
tactically expedient, it would be just as proper for the Government to make
war on the Tsar in the interests of the disfranchised of St. Petersburg as it was
to make war on [Boer] President Kruger in the interests of the disfranchised of
Johannesburg. (“G. B. S. and Nihilism,” Agitations, 76–77)
Shaw’s view was that self-sacrificing political martyrs fashioned to a roman-

tic ideal was not what was needed, but rather a real fight was. It was the
practical voice of Shaw, the socialist revolutionary. Olga Soboleva and
Angus Wrenn concur by arguing in The Only Hope of the World: George
Bernard Shaw and Russia that Shaw was “the voice of realism” who
understood what was required to combat the tyrannical tsar. Shaw’s com-
ment that it was as just for Britain’s Conservative government to war with
Nicholas II as it had been to war against the Boers, four years earlier,
anticipates Shaw’s later press comments on governments’ fickle justifica-
tions for war in the months leading up to the Great War. Stead’s response to
the growing Russian turmoil was different.
Once an open “revolution appeared to be looming in Russia in
September 1905, . . . Stead hurried over to St. Petersburg” to avert “a
crisis”—although Russia had already surpassed the crisis level (Robinson,
247). While there, Stead met with Nicholas II, his wife, Tsarina Alexandra,
and the tsar’s mother, the Dowager Empress. It is not clear whether Stead,
in consultation with the tsar and his wife and mother, attempted to preach
reform, or at least an easing of repressive restrictions. Stead foresaw that
moderate dissenters in Russia would be replaced by radical socialists when
the situation worsened (Robinson, 248). In a sense, both Stead and Shaw
were correct in 1905; armed revolution broke out before year’s end, but
was defeated by the tsar’s troops. However, some constitutional reform was
implemented, only to be overturned by Nicholas years later.
While the 1905 Russian Revolution would prove to have a significant
impact on militant socialists and radicals throughout Europe, and, of course,
throughout Russia, it did not have a great presence in the popular London
press. Editors of such papers sympathized more with the tsar than with
failed revolutionaries aligned with the working classes.8 And even Shaw
could note in 1908 London, “All the socialists I meet have given up talking
about Russia” (qtd. in Soboleva and Wrenn, 31).9 No doubt, Shaw had lost
patience with Russia as the tsar’s autocratic rule continued. Nonetheless,
Stead gained some mileage with his 1905 Russian articles. However, his
reputation in London continued to slide. Sidney Robinson suggests that by
1905, Stead was mostly regarded as a serious journalist outside Britain.
In addition to Stead’s failure with his second attempt to run the Daily
Paper, he made himself ridiculous in London by trying to publish articles
and “stories” on his ability to consult with the departed.10 Still, Stead
carried on his disarmament campaign and attended the Second Hague
Peace Conference in 1907. By that time, the Liberal Party had been in
power for more than a year, led first by Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-
Bannerman, and then by Herbert Asquith due to Campbell-Bannerman
death in 1908. Sir Henry Grey had been named as Foreign Secretary in
1905 and it was he who would steer Britain in the European peace and
armament movements in 1907, and remain as Foreign Secretary into
late 1916.
In anticipating the 1907 conference, Stead, who must have harbored
confidence that Grey would secure a lasting peace, concocted a plan to have
“the best brains of Europe” tour the continent in a “pilgrimage of peace,”
and invited Shaw to participate. Shaw responded in an undated letter: “No
one has ever made me so absurd a proposal before” and declined (qtd. in
Hogan and Baylen, “Unexplored,” 141). Stead had also at this time tried to
recruit twelve recognized public figures from the United States to similarly
tour Europe and converge on the second Peace Conference at The Hague.
To this end, he invited Mark Twain. Twain also declined but Stead berated
him, claiming that declining was not Twain’s “privilege” (Twain, 22, 453).
While the peace pilgrimages did not materialize, Stead, by enlisting the
assistance of the Dutch publisher Maas and Van Suchtelen, founded a new
journal to cover the Hague Peace Conference, Courier de la Conference de la
Paix (van Heerikhuizen). The international Peace Crusade that Stead had
pushed for was occurring again, and it called once more for disarmament—in
theory. No agreements were reached on disarmaments. However, Stead
continued to push forward.
Shortly before his death in 1912, Stead reversed his position on arms and
became “a fervent advocate for more [naval] dreadnoughts” (MacMillan,
304). Stead had reverted to his 1884 position voiced through his “Truth
About the Navy” series that had contributed to Britain entering the
European arms race. Stead was once again seeing arms as the only way to
prevent war, particularly with the navy. It was an about-turn for Stead that
almost mimicked Barbara Undershaft’s turn in Act III of Major Barbara.
Perhaps Stead had come to accept Shaw’s position on armaments stated in
his October 1898 Daily Chronicle letter, where he argued that arms do not
fight, but “men do” (“Trafalgar Celebrations,” 51–57). Or, Stead, long a
supporter of the Liberal Party had been swayed by Grey’s and the govern-
ment’s continued public philosophy of further armaments to preserve
peace. Stead’s navy series, his first fabulous journalistic success, had finally
taken precedence over his years of peace advocacy when all his endeavors
had been to undo what his navy series had originally set out. The arms race,
namely militarism, had expanded far from its 1884 position and was beyond
control in 1912. Maybe Stead appreciated this, or perhaps he was seduced

like many others by the grandeur of Britain’s massive naval and commercial
fleets of 1912, and convinced that such power would discourage any
country from making war with Britain. As for Major Barbara, the play
had foretold the arms race when premiered in 1905, just as Arms and the
Man had foretold the consequences of modern warfare if old notions of
heroism and noble sacrifice remained as ideals and strategies in the armed
forces. But such messages were not being heeded in the face of seductive, if
irrational, military might.
As part of Grey’s foreign policy, under the public commitment to peace,
Russian Tsar Nicholas II visited Britain in 1909—or rather remained mostly
offshore in Cowes on the Isle of Wight. There Nicholas met England’s
Edward VII to strengthen Anglo-Russian relations against, as events would
later reveal, Imperial Germany. No doubt Stead welcomed this visit to
strengthen relations with Russia.
The British government’s advocacy for an alliance with tsarist Russia had
been a focus of Grey’s, much to Shaw’s dismay. The aristocratic Grey would
be a dangerous culprit of British foreign policy for Shaw in the years leading
to and into the Great War (Macmillan 209). Grey orchestrated the Russian
visit to Cowes to prompt British support for the tsar and a Russian alliance,
which it did with the help of Stead-inspired journalists; but it also spurred
protests against the government for maintaining relations with the Russian
tyrant.11 To promote a rally of opposition against the tsar’s visit, Shaw
wrote to the decidedly anti-German leaning Saturday Review, which
published his letter on July 17, 1909. Shaw noted:
There is to be a tremendous demonstration in the Solent [near the Isle of

Wight where the British and Russian royal yachts were to parade with naval
warships] in favour of the Tsar. If there were to be no counter-demonstration
the Government would be justified in concluding that the nation was unan-
imously in favour of the Solent demonstration. The object of the Trafalgar
demonstration is to make such a disastrous and dishonourable inference
impossible. (“Demonstration Against the Tsar,” 121–122)
Disarmament was not on the agenda at Cowes, but Shaw was intent on
opposing Grey’s efforts to strengthen ties with the tsar, which he saw as
creating an alliance against Germany. As a European war seemed closer, Shaw
regarded an alliance with autocratic Russia as preposterous considering that
democratically leaning Britain then had more in common with Germany than
with Russia.
The further arming from 1909 onwards was proving intoxicating for
most Europeans—as demonstrated by Stead in 1912. The attraction of
massive sea power had overwhelmed disarmament sentiments. While Britain
and Germany built their navies, the race to dominate the sea also existed
commercially between the two countries—as well as between commercial
shipping lines within Britain, even those controlled by American backers.
Into this competition, the peace advocate and moralist Stead climbed aboard.
In 1912, he accepted an invitation to address The Men and Religion Fore-
word Movement Conference in New York on April 22 on the subject of
world peace. The invitation came with a first-class ticket on the largest and
most luxurious ship afloat—the Belfast-built Titanic of the White Star Line.
STEAD AND THE UNSINKABLE SHIP

When Stead accepted the invitation to speak in New York on world peace,
he was traveling to the one country where his journalistic reputation still
flickered with some respect. This was, perhaps, due to his relationship with
coal capitalist Andrew Carnegie who had, following Stead’s favorable por-
trait of Carnegie in his 1900 book Carnegie’s Conundrum, financed some
of Stead’s peace initiatives in the early years of the twentieth century.
Carnegie had even recommended Stead to then President Theodore Roo-
sevelt to head a “League of Peace,” which Roosevelt dismissed by asserting
that Stead turned good causes into farces (Robinson, 248–249). However,
the Carnegie connection may have led American newspaper publisher
William Randolph Hearst to engage Stead for a fortnightly column in his
syndicated papers (Robinson, 249). That, in turn, led to Stead being invited
to New York. In the last Review of Reviews issue that he edited, Stead noted
in his column “Progress of the World,” that he was traveling to New York to
speak alongside President William Taft, and added that “he and the Presi-
dent intended to send armies of inspectors into every American town to
gather information pertaining to ‘its moral, industrial, social and religious
condition’” (Robinson, 250). Taft was not scheduled to address the con-
ference nor had he arranged to meet with Stead, but Taft’s trusted aide and
close friend Major Archie Butt was a first-class passenger on the Titanic’s
maiden voyage. If Stead and Butt met on board, there is no account of
it. Both boarded the ship in Southampton.
When the White Star Line’s Titanic stopped in Queenstown (now Cobh)
Ireland to deliver and collect mail and additional passengers—especially third-
class Irish emigrants—Stead mailed a letter to his daughter. He reported
that he had been exploring the ship, noting its exorbitant luxury in the first-
class sections, mingled with fellow-first-class passengers who were among
the wealthiest people in the world, and interviewed crew members for
articles to be written on the ship’s much celebrated and publicized first
voyage across the Atlantic to New York. He specifically noted to his daugh-
ter that the ship was “a splendid monstrous floating Babylon” (qtd. in
Robinson, 250). Perhaps Stead hoped that this return, of sorts, to a modern
Babylon would help restore his journalistic career. He might have recalled,
sometime during the voyage, his fictional story that he published in March
1886 in the Pall Mall Gazette, a year after his “The Maiden Tribute to
Modern Babylon” series, “How the Mail Steamer Went Down in the Mid
Atlantic by a Survivor.” It imagined a shipping disaster with a great loss of
life, with the ship’s officers trying to maintain control on the lifeboat deck
with revolvers. At the story’s end, Stead noted: “This is exactly what might
take place if liners are sent to sea short of lifeboats” (qtd. in Wilson, 205;
Robinson 253–254). Or perhaps Stead recalled his story “From the Old
World to the New” that he published in his 1893 Christmas annual, which
portrayed a passenger who was a mystic, presumably based on himself, who
warns the captain of a ship before them that had struck an iceberg: “keen, as
ever, to give a factual gloss to his story, Stead used a real-life sailor, Captain
Edward Smith” (Robinson, 253). Smith had been made a Captain in the
White Star Line in 1887, and by the early 1890s was given command of
every new White Star ship—a practice that was continued in 1912 with the
line’s newest and grandest ship, Titanic. Stead’s passenger ship stories
allowed journalists, in the Stead tradition, to later claim that Stead had
envisioned or prophesized his own death—but such was only sensationalizing
copy as Stead had predicted numerous other types of deaths for himself
(Robinson, 253–254).
Sidney Robinson suggests that to contemporaries, Stead’s demise on the
Royal Mail Steamer Titanic had “a grim logic,” with Stead being a passen-
ger, and perhaps a participant, in one of the “most incredible news stories of
all time” (1). No doubt, had he survived the disaster, he would have
sensationalized the Titanic story—and his own story within the events.
But in Stead’s vein of sensationalized shock journalism, which he had
pioneered and led through the mid-1880s into the 1890s, journalists in
London—as well as in America—sensationalized the Titanic disaster to
such a supreme state that it even rivaled the reporting of the Whitechapel
murders, which had also questioned the nature of privileged class structures.
Shaw was provoked to respond. His response was on behalf of a British
society willing to lose itself to sensational hysteria, as well as, and most
importantly, for his own journalistic integrity. This time, unlike in 1888, the
Irish Shaw was heeded.
THE TITANIC HYSTERIA: SHAW RESPONDS

While Stead’s career was in the decline when Titanic, then the grandest and
most highly publicized ship in the world, departed from Southampton,
Shaw’s career was reaching great heights, as was his reputation as a public
intellectual. His views mattered. When American Mark Twain visited Shaw
and his wife Charlotte in July 1907 (along with Shaw’s first biographer
Archibald Henderson and friend Max Beerbohm), Twain recorded that
“that brilliant Irishman, Bernard Shaw” had “become a force, and it is
conceded that he must be reckoned with” (Twain, 73; 109). By 1912,
Shaw had written some of his greatest plays: Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Arms
and the Man, Man and Superman, John Bull’s Other Island, Major Barbara,
Getting Married, The Doctor’s Dilemma, and Fanny’s First Play. Even with
such success, Shaw continued to write to the London newspapers, and
occasionally to Dublin and New York papers, and would do so for most of
his long life. While most of his press letters were now on topics he felt
required his attention, often mild attention, he was ready to produce
journalistic commentary of the highest form, if so moved, that was a worthy
continuation of his early press commentary that had developed his voice. As
was his custom since the 1880s, Shaw submitted his journalism to popular
papers, as opposed to writing for underground and radical presses (although
his words appeared in Dublin’s labor paper the Irish Worker in 1912).
Shaw’s journalism was democratic, being geared to all social and economic
classes in true (1880s) Fabian style. In 1912 he was moved to react to the
very worst in journalism, against the rampant and irresponsible shock
sensationalism that thoroughly clouded, rather than illuminated the truth.
So when the Titanic sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912, with the
possible loss of as many as 1,635 lives, the social hysteria generated by
Stead’s journalistic successors provoked Shaw to publicly consider, and
counter the sensationalized press that was leading popular thinking into a
colossal orgy of nonsense eradicating common sense.12 The modernizing
process that Shaw was committed to demanded no less.
As early as April 16, 1912, one day after the ship’s sinking, London’s
Daily Sketch, itself a sensationalizing tabloid newspaper, noted that Titanic
carried “fully thirty millionaires” as the paper contemplated the ship’s loss
when details, especially with regard to the great loss of life, were still mostly
unknown. The paper also commented that “Other notable passengers
included Mr. W. T. Stead, and Major Archibald Butt” (Bryceson, 13).
The paper’s same edition included file photographs of some of these well-
known passengers, including an image of Stead. By the next day’s issue, the
paper was able to report that Stead and Butt were among the many missing
(Bryceson, 24). But as the number of possible dead started to come into
focus, the London and American press began sensationalizing the disaster
almost by the minute, and most—or all—of British and Irish society were
being impacted whether individuals personally knew passengers or crew
members on the ship or not. The loss of the mighty ship undermined, as
no other event in the modernizing era to 1912, the very core of British
beliefs. Prior to the voyage, the ship was believed to be an unsinkable,
triumphant accomplishment of British naval architecture and industrial
engineering, and it would be captained by an experienced British naval
officer, epitomizing British domination of the seas and her Empire. And
to this end, the ship mirrored the very structure of Western capitalist society,
of which England saw itself atop, with its class structure of first-, second-,
and third-class passengers (not to mention the strict hierarchy of the ship’s
crew), all housed in a floating, riveted steel ship dominating the sea before it,
cruising at 22 knots.13 Its sinking in 1912 was a colossal calamity of
staggering proportions. All were affected by it, in one form or another—
and if not, the sensationalizing press did its best to see that the sinking
touched everyone while somehow trying to reaffirm, or re-establish Britain’s
sense of its mastery. Even the government, or particularly the government,
had to respond.
Britain’s Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith addressed the loss of
the Titanic in the House of Commons, which the Daily Sketch dutifully
reported and quoted on April 17: “I am afraid we must brace ourselves to
face one of those terrible events which baffle foresight, which hold the
imagination, which make us realize the inadequacy of words to do justice
to what we feel” (Bryceson, 26). The ship’s loss reached all parts of society.
On April 19 the primarily illustrated paper the Daily Sketch, edited by James
Heddle, reported that various theater managers, including Shaw’s former
associate J. E. Vedrenne, who with Harley Granville Barker had produced
and staged the premieres of some of Shaw’s most important plays at the
Royal Court Theatre, were preparing benefit performances to raise money

for those directly affected by the disaster (Bryceson, 60).14 However, the
real magnitude of the loss in terms of lost lives, rather than in shaken beliefs
of national mastery (which both rich and poor had believed in), required
answers and better words than those provided by Asquith, theater charity
matinees, and the popular press. Foresight needed to be focused, not
baffled.
The official inquiries that immediately investigated the Titanic’s sinking
(the United States Senate hearings in New York and Washington, and the
British Board of Trade Inquiry in London), raised more questions than they
answered, or were prepared to answer. The sensationalizing press—on both
sides of the Atlantic—played on and to the calamity under the guise of
trying to cope with it, and quickly commenced to romanticize the event—
which, of course, has been a tendency with the Titanic in the hundred years
plus since its sinking. When facts were unknown, the press invented sensa-
tionally romantic Titanic stories, or when known, certain facts were ignored
if not conducive to the papers’ sensationalizing efforts. In trying to uphold
early twentieth-century beliefs in the advantages of aristocratic birth and
how capitalist wealth commanded great social privilege, much of the early
public romanticizing focused on first-class passengers.
In the United States the gilded-age millionaire Colonel John Jacob Astor
who died with the ship, was quickly portrayed through romanticizing press
accounts and popular song as a hero who placed his pregnant teenage wife,
younger than Astor’s son from a previous marriage, into a lifeboat, and then
assisted other women to boats (Wilson 112–113). On April 20 the very
popular London Daily Sketch reported, without reservation, that Astor
“helped the children . . . kissed his wife and turned aside when offered a
place in a boat. He handed in the children” (Bryceson, 75). The Denver Post
wrote that “When the name of Astor is mentioned, it will be the John Jacob
who went down with the Titanic that will come first to mind; not the Astor
who made the great fortune, not the Astor who added to its greatness, but
John Jacob Astor, the hero” (qtd. in Wilson 112–113). As Frances Wilson
writes in How to Survive the Titanic, the reality of Astor was probably closer
to the account provided by the ship’s highest ranking surviving officer,
Second Officer Charles Lightoller, who claimed he turned “Astor away
from the lifeboat when he [Astor] asked whether he might join his wife”
(Wilson, 111). Another gilded-age millionaire, William F. Carter, was
reported in the April 23 London Times as having “walked up and down
the deck crying ‘Are there any more women here?’ We called for several
minutes and got no answer” (Bryceson, 112). The reality regarding Carter
was that he stepped into a lifeboat on the ship’s starboard side, moments
after abandoning his wife and children on the port side before they found a
lifeboat. Two years later, Carter’s wife successfully sued Carter for divorce,
citing his desertion of her and their children on the Titanic’s port side
(Wilson 7–8). Hardly heroic realities, but the 1912 romanticized heroic
hysteria of the press continued, and touched on Stead.
The April 20 Daily Sketch reported that “Stead died as he lived—courageous
and fearing nothing. He was foremost in the work to get the women and
children into the boats, and when the last boat had pushed off, Mr. Stead
jumped into the sea” (Bryceson, 74). Of course, there were heroic acts among
the ship’s three classes of passengers and crew, and maybe Stead was among
the heroic, but the excessive romantic sensationalizing that focused on first-
class passengers and on some crew members at the very least marginalized
second- and third-class passengers, and at the most obscured the negligence
that caused the disaster. In other words, romanticizing to reaffirm dying values
veiled the truth and prohibited intelligent public contemplation of the
calamity.
In Britain, where the ship was based, Lloyd’s Weekly News coined a phrase
to describe the loss: “Yet greater than the tragedy is the glory” (qtd. in
Wilson, 234). British press efforts to sensationalize and romanticize cen-
tered on the privileged English passengers—especially aristocrats and
wealthy capitalists—and on the ship’s English officers who all had to be
seen as exceptionally valiant. The aristocrat Tyrell Cavendish, who saw his
wife board lifeboat 6 (Gracie, “Port,” 94), and then disappeared with the
ship, was described in the press as “having died an English noble gentleman,
unselfish and heroic to the last” (qtd. in Wilson, 79). Was this more or less
than the nameless middle-class and working-class men and women who did
the same? The heroism of the privileged British was fanatically portrayed,
believed, and celebrated, even as it was reported that when the third-to-last
lifeboat was being lowered from the ship’s starboard side, the canvas-sided
collapsible C lifeboat, amid a chaotic scene of panic as ship’s officers were
calling for women and children first while holding back terrified passengers
with revolvers, the White Star Line’s chairman and director of the line’s
parent company, American J. P. Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine,
J. Bruce Ismay, stepped into the lifeboat. He knew full well that hundreds of
women and children, and male passengers and crew aboard the ship were
still in need of a place in a lifeboat, and knew they were going to die. In an
effort to explain his actions while lifeboats were being lowered, Ismay
claimed he had assisted in calling for women and children, and helped to
lower boats. During his testimony at the American Senate hearing, the
ship’s Fifth Officer Harold Lowe claimed that Ismay was hampering his
efforts to lower a lifeboat, and told Ismay, essentially his employer: “If you
get the hell out of that I might be able to do something” (qtd. in Wilson,
145).15 Still, Ismay always asserted that he nobly assisted women and
children passengers first, and then stepped into the boat himself.
The British and American press greatly romanticized the call for “women
and children first.” This was carried into popular print within weeks of the
sinking, in the very tradition of Stead’s quickly written and published books,
such as The Sinking of the Titanic: The World’s Greatest Sea Disaster,
published by the National Bible House in Chicago.16 But the British, of
course, believed that they not only originated the heroic call, they owned
it. Reportedly, it was first used in 1852 when HMS Birkenhead, a British
troopship, sank off the coast of South Africa without enough lifeboats for
the troops, passengers, and crew aboard—and the doomed ship’s band
allegedly played “Nearer, my God, to Thee” as the ship plunged beneath
the surface.17 History, it seemed, was repeating itself with regard to lifeboats
in that the Titanic had 2,340 passengers and crew, but carried only
16 wooden lifeboats and four collapsible boats, which had a total capacity
of only 1,100 individuals. In addition, the band was reported to have played
the same tune in the liner’s final moments—a moment made much of in the
London press, as in the Daily Sketch from April 20 (Bryceson, 78).18
Interestingly, the Daily Mail, edited by Thomas Marlowe and part of
Lord Northcliffe’s press empire, published on the same day a leader on
Captain Smith, which remarked that the ship’s band played “Autumn
Ragtime” to help the frightened passengers as the ship sank (“Capt. Smith’s
Last Words,” 3). This reference to a song other than “Nearer, my God, to
Thee” quickly disappeared from papers—but was recalled by Shaw a month
later. Setting aside what music was actually played, to compound the horror
on board Titanic, the ship’s boat deck and lifeboat davits—which held and
lowered the boats—were designed to handle 48 boats rather than the
16 carried, but so many lifeboats, the White Star Line concluded when
outfitting the ship, would have cluttered the boat deck that was located in
the luxurious first-class section (Wilson, 164).19 But still, there was no
mistaking that “women and children first,” in the spring of 1912, was
perceived as a heroic sentiment—although a small article in the April
18 Daily Mail noted that suffragette activist Sylvia Pankhurst, when asked
by a leader writer, stated that there “was no special chivalry attached” to

“women and children first” (Bryceson, 51).
Among the first dramatic accounts of “women and children first” on the
Titanic, which included descriptions of the panic among ship’s passengers
as lifeboats were lowered, was provided by first-class passenger Lady Duff
Gordon, a couture clothing designer and owner of the London West End
“Lucile” line that catered to aristocrats and the very wealthy. She was
traveling to New York to show her latest clothing designs in her recently
opened Manhattan shop. What the sensationalizing and romanticizing press
did not appreciate, especially for a leftist social commentator like Shaw, was
that Lady Duff Gordon departed from the Titanic in a boat that some called
“the captain’s boat” or “the Money Boat.” It left with only Duff Gordon,
her husband Sir Duff Gordon, her secretary (Miss Francatelli), two Amer-
ican male passengers (named Solomon and Stengel), and seven crewmen
(Wilson 18; Gracie, “Starboard,” 181).20 In other words, the boat only
contained two women and ten men. The boat that the Duff Gordons
escaped in was officially known as the Captain’s Emergency Boat, or Boat
1, and was smaller than the ship’s regular lifeboats, which had a capacity of
60 people.
The Emergency Boat’s capacity was set at 40 people, so it was obviously
grotesquely under capacity when it was lowered from the ship. After the
Titanic disappeared, when there were perhaps hundreds of people in the
freezing waters, struggling, screaming, and dying of hypothermia, Boat
1 did not return to help any of them. Eventually there were accusations
that Sir Duff Gordon had bribed the crewmen in the boat not to return to
those in the water. The crewmen later testified to the British inquiry that
Duff Gordon provided each of them with checks for £5 after they were
picked up by the Cunard passenger ship Carpathia, but were ambiguous, or
lied outright about why they did not assist in a rescue operation (Wilson, 18;
Gracie, “Starboard,” 185). Papers throughout Britain, the United States,
and Canada ran articles (and in many instances the same article, word for
word) that detailed Lady Duff Gordon’s account of survival. This interna-
tional exchange of newspaper copy was facilitated by wireless communica-
tion, at that moment perhaps an incidental fact, but it was something that
would have great implications for Shaw by November 1914. However, in
the wake of Titanic’s sinking, the first articles to appear in Britain of Lady
Duff Gordon’s account were published on April 20, 1912, as in the Devon
and Exeter Gazette under the leader “LADY DUFF GORDON”:
Lady Duff Gordon, who left in one of the last boats, said the panic had begun
to seize some of the remaining passengers by the time her boat was lowered.
“Everyone seemed to be rushing for that boat. A few men who crowded in
were turned back at the point of [. . . a ship officer’s] revolver, and several were
felled before order was restored.” (3)
And still, Boat 1 departed with only twelve people on board. Also on April
20, the Daily News ran a longer version of Lady Duff Gordon’s survival
account, which subsequently appeared on April 21 and 22 in papers such as
The Chronicle Herald, the Daily Sketch, and The Daily Mirror—the
New York press had already printed the same article, as in the New York
American. The fuller account began by recalling a ship’s officer ordering,
“The women and children are to go into boats”—even though Sir Duff
Gordon and two other male passengers took their seats in Boat 1. The
account continued:
The boat we got into was the twelfth or thirteenth to be launched. It was the
Captain’s special boat. . . . Five stokers got in and two Americans. A. L.
Solomon, New York, and L. Stengal, of Newark.21 Besides these, there were
two of the crew, and Sir Cosmo, myself and Miss Frank an English girl. There
were a number of other passengers, mostly men, standing nearby, and they
joked with us because we were going out on the ocean.22
This was the article and account that first stirred Shaw to consider the
sensationalizing, romantic, heroic hysteria and lies appearing in the press.
But more was to follow immediately on aristocratic and wealthy passengers
and the captain himself.
On April 21, 1912, six days after the Titanic’s sinking, Shaw wrote
privately to his wife Charlotte of the hysteria that was coming to dominate
daily life in Britain. Charlotte Shaw was at the time visiting Italy, having
traveled there on the Orsova, a much smaller ship than the Titanic. During
Charlotte’s absence from home, Shaw was taking an automobile tour
through the British countryside where he attended an evening service at
Lincoln Cathedral. Shaw turned to the subject of the Titanic in his letter to
Charlotte as he described the vicar’s sermon:
We have been at evening service . . . . No anthem, and not a single word

articulated clearly enough to be intelligible except in the sermon . . . . [the
vicar] drifted on to the Titanic [sic], which has overwhelmed every other topic
here. It is commented on as a heroic melodrama. Lady Duff Gordon’s
narrative stirred up much “women’s first” sentiment. Nobody seemed to

notice that she was in the captain’s boat with one other woman and ten
men. The truth, so far, seems to be that though the captain told the wireless
operator ten minutes after the collision to send word that the ship was sinking,
the passengers were not told so; and the consequence was that they would not
get into the boats, and did not realize that their floating island was about to go
down until it stood up on end and dived. It also appears that a French ship
warned the captain that he was going into an ice field. He thanked them, and
went on at 20 knots. Yet they will have it that a nobler seaman never trod a
deck. They said so—never having heard of him before (his name is Smith)—
on the day when a ridiculous report was circulated that he and his first officer
had shot either themselves or one another immediately after the collision,
possibly in a struggle for safety. The whole attitude of the press is one of simple
romantic insanity. Your Orsova [sic], less than half the size of Titanic, had
more [life]boats. (Collected Letters, III, 85–86)23
One of the main products of the excessive romanticism that troubled

Shaw, and only increased when the British Board of Trade Inquiry into the
ship’s sinking opened in May 1912, was the celebrated image of the ship’s
captain, the English Edward John Smith. While Shaw charged in his letter to
Charlotte that Smith was unknown prior to the sinking, Smith was well
known and established with the White Star Line. Having joined the line in
1880, he rose to captain by 1887, and quickly became the company’s “most
highly respected captain” (Wilson, 42). In fact, Smith, who had enjoyed
43 years of command without any serious mishaps, was fond of saying: “It is
the great Captain, . . . who doesn’t let things happen” (qtd. in Wilson, 45).
But in September 1911, the Titanic’s sister ship Olympic, under Smith’s
command, collided with the British naval cruiser HMS Hawke. In the
following February, two months before he took command of the Titanic,
Smith navigated the Olympic over a submerged wreck and lost a propeller
blade (Wilson, 45). Dismissal of captains involved in serious incidents had
been the White Star Line’s tradition, but it broke the rules for Captain
Smith. Instead of sacking him, the line gave him command of its newest and
grandest ship, the Titanic.
Throughout the contemporary reporting on the Titanic’s sinking, Cap-
tain Smith was constantly hailed as a hero by the sensationalizing press.
Smith’s photograph, a stock image provided by the White Star Line and
printed in the press celebrating the Titanic’s maiden voyage on April
11, was among the first to be reprinted, and frequently, starting on April
16 in the Daily Sketch (Bryceson, 11). Press reports on April 18 that
revealed the Titanic had received ice warnings from ships traveling ahead of
its route, failed to diminish the growing portrayal of Captain Smith. By April
20, papers were running leaders on the bravery of Smith: “Captain Smith
was the biggest hero” (Bryceson, 65). The same paper in the same edition
countered the rumor that Smith had killed himself: “Of all the cruelly
heartless fabrications . . . the most stupid and senselessly false is the tale
that Captain Smith killed himself on the bridge” (Bryceson, 67). The
continuing leader does not specifically address the rumor that Chief Officer
Wilde, second in command, had killed himself, but the leader, in blindly
glorifying the heroism, again insisted that Stead was among the “most
courageous” (Bryceson, 68). However, none were more heroic than Cap-
tain Smith, who died “like a simple hero, as a British sea-captain should”
(Bryceson, 67).
What troubled Shaw about Smith were the fantastic press stories, which
were at least contradictory and mostly pure falsified fantasy. One story
relayed that Smith used a megaphone on the deck as lifeboats were being
lowered and announced, “Be British” (qtd. in Wilson, 44). Shaw considered
such a claim dangerous, whether true or not. Issues of prejudices against
non-English passengers could arise, suggesting that they may have acted
differently and less heroically than the British amid the chaos of the ship’s
final two hours. The Titanic’s third-class passengers included many Irish,
Italians, Eastern Europeans, Swedes, Norwegians, and Lebanese among
their numbers—many of whom had never been told where the lifeboats
were located—a negligence that must rest with the captain (Wilson, 13).
Further romanticized press portrayals of Captain Smith that bordered on
lunacy included him “jumping overboard with a baby swaddled in his arms”
(Wilson, 44). A variation had Smith swimming alongside a lifeboat saying,
“Goodbye boys, I’m going to follow the ship” (qtd. in Wilson, 44). The
reality of Smith’s behavior after ordering lifeboats to be readied once it was
determined the ship was sinking, is non-tangible in that, as Francis Wilson
notes, he “seemed to melt away” (44). Smith played decidedly little or no
role on the boat deck, or the lower decks, where he should have maintained
order and endeavored to stop the panic and chaos—or even provided
instruction for some of the crew in lowering lifeboats as a proper “safety
drill” had never been held (Wilson, 11).24 Reportedly, many of “the crew
were unconfident about handling the [lifeboat] davits and nervous about
filling the boats to capacity in case they buckled” (Wilson, 11). Alarmingly,
these errors in command were seemingly repeated recently with the Costa
Concordia incident off the coast of Italy in January 2012. Clearly Captain
Smith had been given the wireless ice warnings by midday on April 14.
Despite the warnings, the Titanic proceeded at 22 knots. Lookouts were
posted, but binoculars were not provided for the forward crow’s nest
(Wilson, 164). The London press continued to portray Smith as a hero
even though it was known he had been informed about the dangers of ice
and despite his doubtful command decisions.25 Madame Tussaud’s famous
wax gallery confirmed his heroic status by unveiling a “lifelike portrait
model” of Captain Smith within a month of the sinking, reported in the
Daily Sketch on May 10, 1912 (Bryceson, 228). The Smith likeness was not,
apparently, exhibited in Tussaud’s Gallery of Horrors.
Shaw believed the British press and the public were determined to avoid
laying blame where it should have been placed, preferring to believe the
tragic event was an act of God rather than collective negligence between
Captain Smith and the White Star Line; as a consequence Shaw felt com-
pelled to carry his commentary to the public. Shaw’s concern was to prevent
such a horror occurring again, and he believed that rational thinking and
clear judgment were being clouded by romanticizing Titanic’s replication
of the Birkenhead’s call for “women and children first” and its band playing
“Nearer, my God, to Thee” as the Birkenhead’s band had played the same
as it sank.26 In addition, reports trickled into the London press regarding
details from the American Senate Inquiry, which on April 30 questioned
Charles E. Stengal, one of the American passengers in Boat 1, which
included the Duff Gordons. Stengal stated that the boat contained only
12 people—five passengers and seven crewmen. Testimony from Seaman
G. Symons, who took command of Boat 1, contradicted Stengal’s testi-
mony by falsely stating that the boat had 14 to 20 passengers, plus crew, and
had returned to the site where the ship sank, but found no one alive to
rescue.27 Stengal’s testimony seemed to bring the questions of Boat 1 to a
close for the American Senate Inquiry, which was more focused on the
White Star’s director Bruce Ismay—but no real conclusions were reached
beyond the need for more lifeboats. Still, as the real horror of what had
transpired was starting to emerge, the London and American press contin-
ued to sensationalize, falsify, and romanticize the event. It was, for the
public, easier to believe in the heroism of aristocrats, millionaires, and
authority figures than to contemplate the failure of such figures that much
of British society had faithfully believed in. Shaw had to respond publicly.28
SHAW RESPONDS PUBLICLY

Shaw wrote his letter, titled “THE TITANIC: SOME UNMENTIONED MORALS,” and
sent it to London’s Daily News, the same paper that had published the full
Lady Duff Gordon survival account on April 20. The paper, originally
founded and edited by Charles Dickens, was owned by chocolatier George
Cadbury and edited by Alfred George Gardiner. Shaw’s letter was published
on May 14, 1912, one month after the iceberg collision. He was cognizant
of the fact that many in Britain in 1912 had some maritime knowledge, and
it was the golden age of passenger shipping. On the very same day, the Daily
Sketch published a leader on a medium named Mrs. Coates, who claimed to
have interviewed the dead Stead, with Stead confirming that it was he who
“asked the band of the Titanic [sic] to play ‘Nearer, My God, To Thee,’”
reported as fact (Bryceson, 238). Shaw wrote:
Why is it that the effect of a sensational catastrophe on a modern nation is to

cast it into transports, not of weeping, not of prayer, not of sympathy with the
bereaved nor congratulations of the rescued, not of poetic expression of the
soul purified by pity and terror, but of a wild defiance of inexorable Fate and
undeniable Fact by an expression of outrageous romantic lying?
What is the first demand of romance in a shipwreck? It is the cry of Women
and Children First. No male creature is to step into a boat as long as there is a
woman or child on the doomed ship. How the [life]boat is to be navigated
and rowed by babies and women occupied in holding the babies is not
mentioned. The likelihood that no sensible woman would trust either herself
or her child in a boat unless there was a considerable percentage of [crew]men
on board is not considered.29
Most of the Titanic’s lifeboats had some crewmen aboard to “command”

the vessels and to help with rowing. Shaw continued:
Women and children first: that is the romantic formula. And never did the
chorus of solemn delight at the strict observance of this formula by the British
heroes on board the Titanic rise to sublime strains than in the papers
containing the first account of the wreck by a surviving eyewitness, Lady
Duff Gordon. She described how she escaped in the captain’s boat. There
was one other woman in it, and ten men: twelve all told. One woman for every
five men. Chorus: “Not once or twice in our rough island story,” etc., etc.
The modified quotation in the line above is from Alfred Tennyson’s roman-
tic tribute to the Anglo-Irish hero of Waterloo: “Ode on the Death of the
Duke of Wellington” reads, “Not once or twice in our fair island story”.30
Second romantic demand. Though all the men (except the foreigners, who
must all be shot by stern British officers in attempting to rush the boats over
the bodies of the women and children) must be heroes, the captain must be a
super-hero, a magnificent seaman, cool, brave, delighting in death and dan-
ger, and a living guarantee that the wreck was nobody’s fault, but, on the
contrary, a triumph of British navigation. Such a man Captain Smith was
enthusiastically proclaimed on the day when it was reported (and actually
believed, apparently) that he had shot himself on the bridge, or shot the first
officer, or been shot by the first officer, or shot anyhow to bring the curtain
down effectively. Writers who had never heard of Captain Smith to that hour
wrote of him as they would hardly write of [Lord] Nelson.31 The one thing
positively known was that Captain Smith had lost his ship by deliberately and
knowingly steaming into an ice field at the highest speed he had coal for. He
paid the penalty; so did most of those for whose lives he was responsible. Had
he brought them and the ship safely to land, nobody would have taken the
smallest notice of him.
Third romantic demand. The officers must be calm, proud, steady,
unmoved in the intervals of shooting the terrified foreigners.
Reports continued in the press that the ship’s officers bravely fired their
revolvers at “foreigners” who rushed the lifeboats and clambered over
women and children for a chance at survival, as in the reported shooting
of an Italian passenger in the Daily Sketch (Bryceson, 164). Shaw continued:
The verdict that they had surpassed all expectations was unanimous. The
actual evidence was that Mr. [J. Bruce] Ismay was told by the officer of his
boat to go to hell, and that boats which were not full refused to go to the
rescue of those who were struggling in the water in cork jackets.32 Reason
frankly given: they were afraid. The fear was as natural as the officer’s language
to Mr. Ismay: who of us at home dare blame them or feel sure that we should
have been any cooler or braver? But is it necessary to assure the world that only
Englishmen could have behaved so heroically, and to compare their conduct
with the hypothetic dastardliness which lascars or Italians or foreigners gen-
erally—say [Norwegian explorers] Nansen or Amundsen or the [Italian
explorer Amedeo, the] Duke of Abruzzi—would have shown in the same
circumstances?
Fourth romantic demand. Everybody must face death without tremor; and
the band, according to the Birkenhead [sic] precedent, must play “Nearer, my
God, to Thee,” as an accompaniment to the invitation to Mr. Ismay to go to
hell. It was duly proclaimed that thus exactly it fell out. Actual evidence: the
captain and officers were so afraid of a panic that, though they knew the ship
was sinking, they did not dare to tell the passengers so—especially the third-
class passengers—and the band played Rag Times to reassure the passengers,
who, therefore, did not get into the boats, and did not realise their situation
until the boats were gone and the ship was standing on her head before
plunging to the bottom. What happened then Lady Duff Gordon has related,
and the witnesses of the American inquiry could hardly bear to relate.33
The American Senate Inquiry into the Titanic disaster commenced on April
19, and continued to May 25. The testimony of survivor Major Peuchen, of
lifeboat 6, related how the Titanic’s quartermaster R. Hitchins, who
commanded boat 6, refused to return to where the ship sank in order to
save some of those still alive in the freezing water, and the popular press
made little of the testimony (Gracie, “Starboard,” 101).34 The British
Board of Trade Inquiry had been underway since May 2, and would
continue to July 3. Shaw’s comment about the ship’s officers not immedi-
ately informing passengers of the seriousness of the situation, and the
realization for most passengers of the disaster coming only when it was
dramatically apparent that the ship was sinking, came from press accounts as
the one on April 20 in the Daily Sketch: “the officers of the ship reassured
the passengers . . . . It was fully a half an hour before the full realisation of the
effect of what had happened dawned upon . . . [the] passengers. The ship
began to fill and settle down by the head” (Bryceson, 78). Still the press
failed to criticize any of the ship’s officers. And no doubt, the lack of
information given by those officers to the Titanic’s third-class passengers,
weighed particularly heavy on Shaw, who at this time had been agitating for
two years for the erasure of class divides and the establishment of equal
salaries—as in his “Equality” lecture on December 9, 1910 (which followed
his October 3, 1910 Dublin lecture, “The Poor Law and Irish Destitu-
tion”). Shaw’s outrage and indignation continued, as expressed in his May
14 Titanic letter:
I ask, what is the use of all this ghastly, blasphemous, inhuman, braggartly
lying? Here is a calamity which might well make the proudest man humble,
and the wildest joker serious. It makes us vainglorious, insolent, and menda-
cious. At all events, that is what our journalists assumed. Were they right or
wrong? Did the Press really represent the public? I am afraid it did. Church-
men and statesmen took much the same one. The effect on me was one of
profound disgust, almost of national dishonour. Am I mad? Possibly. At all
events, that is how I felt and how I feel about it. It seems to me that when
deeply moved[,] men should speak the truth. The English nation appears to
take precisely the contrary view. Again I am in the minority. What will be the
end of it?—for England, I mean. Suppose we came into conflict with a race
that had the courage to look facts in the face and the wisdom to know itself for
what it was. Fortunately for us, no such race is in sight. Our wretched
consolation must be that any other nation would have behaved just as
absurdly. G. Bernard Shaw. (Bernard Shaw, “The Titanic,” 141–144)
As Shaw anticipated, his views on the popular press and public reactions
to the Titanic sinking indeed placed him in the minority within Britain and
elsewhere. However, his press letter provoked not only controversy, but
also tangible public action, both of which were also noticeable when he
reacted to sensationalizing press patriotism unleashed in the early months of
the Great War. Perhaps this was fitting in that there was a great loss of life
due to the Titanic’s sinking, and incomprehensible mass death and suffering
during the Great War.
But in April 1912, crowds of people gathered outside the White Star’s
offices in London and Southampton in the days following the Titanic’s loss,
trying to read the posted lists of those among the survivors or missing.
(Most of the Titanic’s crew resided in Southampton and White Star Line
ships were ported there—although they bore Liverpool on their sterns in
recognition of the line’s official origin.) It would be a scene magnified and
greatly repeated throughout Britain and Europe during the Great War.
Such connections between Titanic and the coming war were voiced in
April 2012 during the centennial observations of the Titanic’s final landfall
at Cobh (then Queenstown), County Cork, Ireland, when Ireland’s Pres-
ident Michael D. Higgins stated: “The same technological capability of
Titanic was subsequently used to generate the nightmare of the Great
War—a war that created casualties on an industrial scale and shattered any
assumption that advancing technology and human progress were inelucta-
bly linked” (“Remarks at Titanic Centenary”).
And unlike Shaw’s responses to the Whitechapel murders in 1888 and
the Parnell scandal in 1890, which for the most part did not provoke
tangible results such as government action, Shaw’s brilliant journalistic
response on May 14, 1912 to the London press’ sensationalizing and
romanticizing of the Titanic was highly provocative and tangibly successful.

His very clear public reference to the Titanic’s Boat 1 containing Sir and
Lady Duff Gordon publicly challenged the press’ romanticized view of the
privileged, questioned class society, and forced the British Board of Trade
Inquiry to consider the detail of events relating to the lifeboat. Provoking
official action for Shaw was comparable to Stead’s influential successes in
1884 and 1885; perhaps not on the same governmental scale as Stead’s
1880s successes, but the 1912 world was far more complex and Shaw’s
results with Boat 1, and his societal critique, had extreme relevance on the
eve of the Great War.
The Duff Gordons were not called on to testify before the American
Senate Inquiry into the Titanic’s demise, despite the fact that fellow Boat
1 passenger Charles Stengal was called—along with Seaman Symons, who
commanded Boat 1. As stated above, Stengal and Symons provided the
American Inquiry with contradictory evidence, and the matter was dropped.
The British Board of Trade Inquiry investigating the sinking was still
proceeding when Shaw published his May 14 letter that directly drew
attention to Boat 1 and Lady Duff Gordon’s survival account printed
weeks earlier in popular newspapers in Britain and the United States. The
British Inquiry called Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon to testify six days
after Shaw’s letter was published. Arguably, Shaw’s letter helped to force
the British Inquiry to address the serious questions concerning Boat 1, and
prevented the London press from sweeping the Duff Gordons and Boat
1 away without public scrutiny—despite the Duff Gordons’ class and
privilege.
Present as spectators on May 20 for the British Inquiry were numerous
aristocratic and prominent customers of Lady Duff Gordon’s “Lucile”
couture line, such as the prime minister’s wife, Margot Asquith, all of
which added a fanciful atmosphere to the testimony.35 The Daily Sketch
on May 21 noted that Lady Duff Gordon “was dressed in black, with a
touch of white at her neck and bosom, and from her black hat fell a black veil
over her shoulders”—a costume indeed (Bryceson, 261). But before the
Duff Gordons testified, the British Inquiry questioned some of the crew
members who were in Boat 1. Ship’s fireman J. Taylor (from the engine
room), admitted that one of the two women in the boat, on hearing
someone’s suggestion that they return to the people in the water, stated
that their boat could be “swamped” with too many people trying to get in
it. Taylor added: “Two gentlemen in the boat said it would be dangerous”
(qtd. in Gracie, “Starboard,” 186). Another ship’s fireman, Robert William
Pusey, was more forthcoming and related that, “I heard Lady Duff Gordon
say to Miss Francatelli: ‘You have lost your beautiful nightdress,’ and I said:
‘Never mind, you have saved your lives; but we have lost our kit’: then Sir
Cosmo [Duff Gordon] offered to provide us with new ones” (qtd. in
Gracie, “Starboard,” 187). Of the Duff Gordons, Cosmo testified first.
Duff Gordon explained that a ship’s officer placed he, his wife, and Miss
Francatelli into Boat 1, and
then put two Americans in, and after that he [the ship’s officer] said to two or
three firemen that they had better get in. When the boat was lowered I
thought the Titanic was in a very grave condition. At the time I thought
that certainly all the women had gotten off. No notice at all was taken in our
boat of these cries [of those in the water dying of hypothermia]. No thought
entered my mind about it being possible to go back and try to save some of
these people. (qtd. in Gracie, “Starboard, 187–188)
Sir Cosmo also explained that on learning that the crewmen in Boat
1 had lost their kits (supplies that each sailor was responsible for providing at
their own expense), he provided each with a check for £5. Despite the fact
that Sir Cosmo and the crewmen from Boat 1 who testified could not
explain why they did not travel back to the people freezing in the water,
the sensationalizing press still opted for the ridiculous as they focused on Sir
Cosmo’s generosity to the working-class crewmen—as if reaffirming the
privilege of the privileged. The Daily Sketch published a photograph of one
of Sir Cosmo’s checks (Bryceson, 257).
Perhaps thinking that the aristocracy was on trial, as well as her reputa-
tion and the reputation of her business, Lady Duff Gordon repeatedly
referred to Boat 1 as the “little boat,” despite its ability to hold 40 people,
in her testimony before the British Inquiry (Titanic Inquiry, British).36 She
also referred to her assistant Francatelli as “Miss Frank,” perhaps in an effort
to avoid any of the “foreign” prejudices that the press had been bantering,
and to which Shaw had alluded.37 During her questioning, Lady Duff
Gordon was asked about the article that appeared in numerous papers,
including the Daily News on April 20—the article that first drew Shaw
into taking up the Titanic frenzy, in a private letter on April 21 to wife
Charlotte. Lady Duff Gordon denied writing the article and denied provid-
ing any of the details to any leader writer for any newspaper while in
New York. She claimed it was all an “invention,” but was then asked
about specific points in the article and their validity. She said everything
was false, but when pressed about the article’s statement on the number of
passengers in Boat 1, she concurred that it was true: “It was Mr. Salomon
and Mr. Stengel and Miss Franks, my husband and myself. We were the
passengers” (Titanic Inquiry, British). There was no escaping the fact that
there were only 12 people in Boat 1, as Shaw stated: “There was one other
woman in it, and ten men: twelve all told.” Lady Duff Gordon tried to insist
that the widely published article had been written by “A man [. . .] from
what he thought he heard me saying” (Titanic Inquiry, British).38
Eventually, on June 14, the British Board of Trade Inquiry made its final
statement on the Duff Gordons. The Attorney General, Sir Rufus Issacs,
stated, according to the Daily Sketch on June 15, that he “did not intend to
make any further comment or criticism on Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff
Gordon. Their conduct, whatever it was, was immaterial to this inquiry, . . .
[However] ‘That boat [Boat 1] must form a good deal of criticism’”
(Bryceson, 291). Shaw’s May 14 letter had, no doubt, helped to raise public
questions about the Duff Gordons, helped to bring some public scrutiny to
the Lady Duff Gordon press accounts of her survival that had been
published in various British papers from April 20–22, and begun some
process of understanding the truth; namely, that the focus should not be
on absurd notions of romantic heroism attributed to the privileged, nor on
the fight of individuals to survive, but rather on ways to prevent such
catastrophes from being repeated. More lifeboats were required, as well as
proper and thorough instruction to crews in loading said lifeboats. But on
the same day as the Duff Gordons testified before the British Inquiry, a
public attack was made on Shaw’s May 14 letter which unleashed a public
outcry against Shaw, anticipating the one that would be raised about his
journalism during the Great War.
SHAW, CONAN DOYLE, AND TITANIC CONTROVERSY

On May 20, 1912, the Daily News—which had published Shaw’s May
14 letter—now published a response from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Conan Doyle, true to his British imperial leanings and tendency to surren-
der or succumb to press sensationalism—something his creation Sherlock
Holmes would never have done—took great offense at Shaw’s letter and
views. He charged Shaw with gross insensitivity to the gravity of the
situation (Conan Doyle, “20 May 1912” in Bernard Shaw Agitations
144–146). But more than that, Conan Doyle’s letter seriously attacked
the integrity of Shaw’s journalism and journalistic approach. Perhaps
sensing an opportunity for retaliation from the January 1898 meeting in

Hindhead of Stead’s Peace Crusade, when Shaw spoke after Conan Doyle
and explained why the latter’s proposals for disarmament would be “disas-
trous,” Conan Doyle blatantly went on the offensive:
I have just been reading the article by Mr. Bernard Shaw upon the loss of the
Titanic [sic]. It is written professedly in the interests of truth, and accuses
everyone around him of lying. Yet I can never remember any production
which contained so much that was false within the same compass. How a man
could write with such looseness and levity of such an event at such a time
passes all comprehension.
Conan Doyle then takes up Shaw’s partial focus on Boat 1 and Lady Duff
Gordon’s survival narrative widely published on April 20—but even he can
see the unusual nature of Boat 1:
He [Shaw] picks out, therefore, one single boat, the smallest of all, which was
launched and directed under peculiar circumstances, which are now matter for
inquiry. Because there were ten men and two women in this boat, therefore
[according to Shaw] there was no heroism or chivalry; and all talk about it is
affectation.
Conan Doyle then explained that the next lifeboat launched, which he
asserts Shaw knew about, had “65 women out of 70 occupants.” He
continued by accusing Shaw of presenting a false impression by focusing
on Boat 1—Conan Doyle does not acknowledge that Boat 1 had a capacity
for 40 people and that it was one of the last boats to be lowered from the
ship. But Shaw’s target was the excessive and sensationalizing romanticism
of the press, which was mesmerizing the public into irrational celebrations
of heroism, instead of addressing blame in order to prevent future disasters.
However, Conan Doyle took the greatest exception to Shaw’s letter
regarding Titanic’s captain:
His [Shaw’s] next paragraph is devoted to the attempt to besmirch the

conduct of Capt. Smith. He does it by his favourite method of ‘suggestio
falsi’—the false suggestion being that the sympathy shown by the public for
Capt. Smith took the shape of condoning Capt. Smith’s navigation . . . the
[press’ and public’s] sympathy was at the spectacle of an old and honoured
sailor who has made one terrible mistake, and who deliberately gave his life in
reparation, discarding his lifebelt, working to the last for those whom he had
unwillingly injured, and finally swimming with a child to a boat into which he
himself refused to enter.
Conan Doyle attempts to chastise Shaw for criticizing the ludicrous and
romantic hero-worshiping of Captain Smith, while believing one of the
absurd stories (contradicted elsewhere) of Smith swimming alongside a
lifeboat and handing an infant to those inside, while refusing to board
himself. Even a casual glimpse at the White Star Line’s publicity photograph
of Smith circulated for the Titanic’s maiden voyage, and then reprinted
incessantly after the sinking, reveals an elderly and portly gentleman of
which it would be hard to believe that he could have swum alongside a
lifeboat, with an infant in his arms, in the icy, freezing water. Shaw’s point
was that such preposterous romanticized stories only obscured the truth and
diverted the public from questioning the captain’s decisions—which needed
to be questioned—along with the White Star Line’s decision not to include
the maximum number of lifeboats that the ship was designed to carry. And
given all of the contradictory accounts reported of Smith’s behavior and
death after the iceberg collision, Shaw was absolutely correct in writing,
“The one thing positively known was that Captain Smith had lost his ship by
deliberately and knowingly steaming into an ice field at the highest speed he
had coal for.” Conan Doyle included a pledge in his response that he would
contribute £100 to the Fabian Society if Shaw could show him any news-
paper report on Smith written “in the terms of Nelson,” obviously coun-
tering Shaw’s statement that the press’ leader writers wrote of Smith “as
they would hardly write of Nelson.”
Conan Doyle’s next aim was to accuse Shaw of insinuating that the ship’s
officers failed to do their duty:
He quotes as if it were a crime the words of [Fifth Officer] Lowe to Mr. Ismay
when he interfered with his [life]boat. I could not imagine a finer example of
an officer doing his duty than that a subordinate should dare to speak thus to
the managing director of the Line when he thought that he was impeding his
life-saving work.
Continuing, Conan Doyle wrote: “The sixth officer [James P. Moody]

went down with the captain, so I presume that even Mr. Shaw could not ask
him to do more.” Conan Doyle added:
Mr. Shaw finds some cause for offense in the fact that one of them [ship’s
officers] discharged his revolver in order to intimidate some foreign immi-
grants who threatened to rush the boats. The fact and the assertion that these
passengers were foreigners came from several eyewitnesses. Does Mr. Shaw
think it should have been suppressed? If not what is he scolding about?
There are many reasons why Shaw, and hopefully others, were (and are)
disturbed by the “foreigner” remarks in the sensationalizing press. Using
“foreigners” in this context was meant to inflame the sympathies of most
English readers. Yes, there were many non-English passengers aboard, and
to some of them—especially from third class where there was little or no
information regarding lifeboats—the boat deck must have been extremely
frightening, especially for those unable to speak English. Perhaps the real
question being posed by Shaw was, were there no English and wealthy
Anglo-American passengers who rushed the boats (there were) and were
none kept back with revolvers? No doubt, and as indicated above, there is
evidence of cowardly and selfish acts by even first-class passengers—which
are more identifiable than accounts of rushing, panic-stricken, third-class
passengers, whether “foreigners” or not. And, of course, Shaw no doubt
was also asking, who can justifiably define “foreigners”—and are “for-
eigners” lives less valuable?
As to the general issue that Shaw raises with the romantic “demand” that
the ship’s officers were all heroes, is the fact that most passengers were
ill-informed regarding their desperate situation as the huge ship slowly but
steadily sank. That must lie with the Captain and officers.
Next, or “Finally,” Conan Doyle notes:
Mr. Shaw tries to defile the beautiful incident of the band by alleging that it
was the result of orders issued to avert panic. But if it were, how does that
detract either from the wisdom of the orders or from the heroism of the
musicians? It was right to avert panic, and it was wonderful that men could be
found to do it in such a way.
Again, Conan Doyle misreads Shaw’s press letter. Shaw did not take issue
with the band playing, but with the press’ insistence that the last song played
as the ship was sinking was “Nearer, my God, to Thee” in the tradition of
the Birkenhead sinking.39 The ship’s band had moved Conan Doyle to write
“a special poem” titled “Ragtime” for an April 30 charity performance at
London’s Hippodrome Theatre to raise funds for Titanic victims. The
poem celebrates the band playing ragtime as the ship was sinking (Conan
Doyle Collected Letters, 581–582).
Conan Doyle added, “As to the general accusation that the occasion has
been used for the glorification of British qualities, we should indeed be a lost
people if we did not honour courage and discipline when we see it in its
highest form.” Conan Doyle was not recognizing the incompetence and/or
negligence that had been at play with Titanic. The sinking was not an act of
God, nor the result of one “terrible” mistake, but the dangerous act of
combined negligence and incompetence with horrific consequences. Not to
see Captain Smith’s grave responsibility was the type of thinking that could
lead to further mass deaths on a grotesque scale—as would occur during the
Great War, only two years away.
Conan Doyle concluded his letter: “But surely it is a pitiful sight to see a
man of undoubted genius using his gifts in order to misrepresent and decry
his own people, regardless of the fact that his words must add to the grief of
those who have already had more than enough to bear” (“20 May 1912,”
Bernard Shaw Agitations, 144–146).
Shaw had to respond to Conan Doyle’s attack on his journalistic integ-
rity, which arguably was an attack on the best practices of the New Jour-
nalism as Shaw had attacked its worst practices. Shaw responded with a
letter published in the Daily News on April 22:
Sir,—I hope to persuade my friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, now that he has
got his romantic and warm-hearted protest off his chest, to read my article
again three or four times, and give you his second thoughts on the matter; for
it is really not possible for any sane man to disagree with a single word that I
have written. I again submit when news of a shipwreck arrives without
particulars, and journalists immediately begin to invent particulars, they are
lying. It is nothing to the point that authentic news may arrive later on, and
may confirm a scrap or two of their more obvious surmises. The first narratives
which reached us were those by an occupant of a boat in which there were ten
men, two women, and plenty of room for more, and of an occupant of
another boat which, like the first, refused to return to rescue the drowning
because the people in it were avowedly afraid. It was in the face of that
information, and of that alone, that columns of raving about women and
children first were published. Sir Arthur says that I “picked out” these boats
[boats 1 and 6] to prove my case. Of course I did. I wanted to prove my case.
They did prove it. They do prove it. My case is that our journalists wrote
without the slightest regard to facts; that they were actually more enthusiastic
in their praise of the Titanic [sic] heroes on the day when the only evidence to
hand was evidence of conduct for which a soldier would be shot and a Navy
sailor hanged when later news came in of those officers and crews who did
their best; and that it must be evident to every reasonable man that if there had
not been a redeeming feature in the whole case, exactly the same
“hogwash” (as Mr. Cunningham Graham calls it in his righteous disgust40)
would have been lavished on the veriest dastards as upon a crew of Grace
Darlings [a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who rescued five people from a
shipwreck in 1838]. The captain positively lost popularity when the deliberate
and calumnious lie that he had shot himself was dropped. May I ask what value
real heroism has in a country which responds to these inept romances invented
by people who can produce nothing after all but stories of sensational cow-
ardice? Would Sir Arthur take a medal from the hands of the imbecile liars
whom he is defending?
Shaw continues in his cutting response as he clearly resented being lectured

by the popular and romanticizing author, Conan Doyle, who, like the
sensational press’ editors and leader writers, was not facing the facts. It
was easier for popular journalists to romanticize; therefore it was easier for
the grief-stricken public, including Conan Doyle, to be led into believing
the romance than it was to face the factual reality of the ship’s captain and
his capitalist masters. Believing the romance did not challenge society’s
leaders or structure. And to accuse Shaw of lying when he presented the
truth and questioned all that Captain Smith and the White Star Line
represented, was going too far:
Sir Arthur accuses me of lying; and I must say that he gives me no great
encouragement to tell the truth. But he proceeds to tell, against himself, what
I take to be the most thundering lie ever sent to a printer by a human author.
He first says that I “quoted as if it were a crime” the words used by the officer
who told Mr. Ismay to go to hell. I did not. I said the outburst was very
natural, though not in my opinion admirable or heroic. If I am wrong, then I
claim to be a hero myself; for it has occurred to me in trying circumstances to
lose my head and temper and use the exact words attributed (by himself) to
the officer in question. But Sir Arthur goes on to say: “I could not imagine a
finer example of an officer doing his duty than that a subordinate should dare
to speak thus to the managing director of the line when he thought he was
impeding his life-saving work.” Yes you could, Sir Arthur; and many a page of
heroic romance from your hand attests that you have often imagined much
finer examples. Heroism has not quite come to that yet; nor has your imag-
ination contracted or your brain softened to the bathos of seeing sublimity in a
worried officer telling even a managing director (godlike being!) to go to hell.
I would not hear your enemy libel you so. But now that you have chivalrously
libeled yourself, don’t lecture me for reckless mendacity; for you have cap-
tured the record in the amazing sentence I have just quoted.
Shaw next took up Conan Doyle’s pledge to make a donation to the Fabian
Society if Shaw could produce a leader referring to Captain Smith in the
terms of British Naval hero Lord Nelson:
I will not accept Sir Arthur’s offer of £100 to the Fabian Society for every
hyper-Nelsonic eulogy of the late Captain Smith which stands in the newspa-
pers of those first days to bear out my very moderate description of them. I
want to see the Fabian Society solvent, but not at the cost of utter destitution
to a friend.
As to the charge that Shaw unnecessarily added to the bereavement of

Captain Smith’s family, Shaw wrote:
I should not have run the risk of adding to the distress of Captain Smith’s
family by adding one word to facts that speak only too plainly for themselves if
others had been equally considerate. But if vociferous journalists will persist in
glorifying the barrister whose clients are hanged, the physician whose patients
die, the general who loses battles, and the captain whose ship goes to the
bottom, such false coin must be nailed to the counter at any cost. There have
been British captains who have brought their ships safely through icefields by
doing their plain duty and carrying out their instructions. There have been
British captains who have seen to it that their crew knew their [assigned life]
boats and their places in their boats, and who, when it became necessary to
take to those boats, have kept discipline in the face of death, and not lost one
life that could have been saved. And often enough nobody has said “Thank
you” to them for it, because they have not done mischief enough to stir the
emotions of our romantic journalists. These are the men whom I admire and
with whom I prefer to sail.
Shaw now drove his points home regarding Conan Doyle and Captain
Smith:
I do not wish to imply that I for a moment believe that the dead man actually
uttered all the heartbreaking rubbish that has been put into his mouth by fools
and liars; nor am I forgetting that a captain may not be able to make himself
heard and felt everywhere in these huge floating (or sinking) hotels as he can
in a [navy] cruiser, or rally a mob of waiters and dock labourers as he could a
crew of trained seamen. But no excuse, however good, can turn a failure into a
success. Sir Arthur cannot be ignorant of what would happen had the Titanic
[sic] been a King’s [naval] ship, or of what the court-martial would have said
and done on the evidence of the last few days.
Next Shaw drew on his family’s connection to maritime Atlantic passenger

service, through his mother’s brother Walter Gurly, and his own near
experience with drowning in 1907:
Owing to the fact that a member of my family was engaged in the Atlantic
service, and perhaps also that I happen to know by personal experience what it
is like to be face to face with death in the sea, I know what the risk of ice means
on a liner, and know also that there is no heroism in being drowned when you
cannot help it.41 The captain of the Titanic [sic] did not, as Sir Arthur thinks,
make “a terrible mistake.” He made no mistake. He knew perfectly well that
ice is the only risk that is considered really deadly in his line of work, and,
knowing it, he chanced it and lost the hazard. Sentimental idiots, with a break
in the voice, tell me that “he went down to the depths”: I tell them with the
impatient contempt they deserve, that so did the cat. Heroism is extraordi-
narily fine conduct resulting from extraordinarily high character. Extraordi-
nary circumstances may call it forth and may heighten its dramatic effect by
pity and terror, by death and destruction, by darkness and a waste of waters;
but none of these accessories are the thing itself; and to pretend that they are is
to debase the moral currency by substituting the conception of sensational
misfortune for inspiring achievement. (Laurence, “Notes,” Collected Letters,
II, 148)
Shaw then concluded his response by alluding to the continuing British

Board of Trade Inquiry, led by Lord Mersey. The Inquiry’s latest develop-
ments further supported Shaw’s views of the press’ sensational romantic
lying based on fact-less fantasy:
I am no more insensible to the pity of the catastrophe than anyone else; but I
have been driven by an intolerable provocation of disgusting and
dishonourable nonsense to recall our journalists to their senses by saying
bluntly that the occasion has been disgraced by a callous outburst of romantic
lying. To this I now wish to add that if, when I said this, I had read the
evidence elicited by Lord Mersey’s inquiry as to the [ship] California [sic] and
the Titanic’s [sic] emergency boat, I should probably have expressed myself
much more strongly. I refrain now only because the facts are beating the
hysterics without my help. G. Bernard Shaw. (“Titanic,” 143–144)
Indeed, the British Inquiry into the Titanic had revealed and confirmed
the non-heroic and questionable details of Boat 1 with the Duff Gordons
aboard, and it also raised questions about the British freighter Californian.
On May 15, the day after Shaw’s first press letter on the Titanic was
published in the Daily News, the Daily Sketch reported testimony from the
Californian’s Captain, Stanley Lord, from the ship’s officer apprentice, and
from the ship’s Second Officer. The testimony revealed that the Californian
had shut off its engines amid an ice field on the night of April 14–15 and
waited for daylight. The apprentice and Second Officer had seen a ship’s
light in the distance, and witnessed white rockets fired from the distant, but
visible ship on the horizon. Captain Lord testified that when he was
informed of the rockets, he thought they were the ship’s company rockets,
and thought no further on the matter. The Titanic had fired white rockets
as distress signals in hopes of attracting assistance from the ship, whose lights
were seen by Titanic’s officers. The Californian’s officer apprentice also
testified that he thought the ship on the horizon had flickering lights and
wondered if the ship was trying to communicate through Morse code,
which it was. On May16, the Daily Sketch reported testimony from the
Californian’s Third Officer. He related a conversation with Captain Lord in
which he stated that he believed the ship in the distance was a passenger
ship, to which the Captain disagreed and added that the only passenger ship
near was Titanic (Bryceson, 230–245). The British Inquiry had raised
serious questions as to why Captain Lord, commander of a freighter within
possibly only twelve miles and in sight of the Titanic while it was sinking,
did not respond to the distress flares fired repeatedly by the Titanic’s crew
during its last hours—which were seen on the Californian’s bridge—and
did not, at the very least, turn its Marconi wireless system on in an attempt
to make contact (Butler 183, 89).
By mid-May certain facts about the Titanic were proving that Shaw had
clearly been correct in his assertions concerning the early reporting on the
tragedy—those facts demanded opinions to be voiced and protests to be
made regarding the clearly evident neglect of various parties. The sensa-
tionalizing and romantic popular reporting, and the public hysteria it pro-
duced—with many romanticized notions about Titanic still in vogue a
century later—effectively colluded with the White Star Line’s efforts to
mask blatant negligence in favor of seeing the Titanic’s sinking as an act
of God. To Shaw, such efforts were no better than those of the
Californian’s captain to defend the indefensible. It was Shaw’s assertion
that the truth must be faced and only through doing so could rational
changes be implemented for the betterment of human existence. This, Shaw

proved, was journalism at its finest, countering and denouncing the worst of
journalism that fabricated sensationalism rather than getting to the “bot-
tom” of “everything”—as Shaw had defined the ideal journalist’s work in
1901. And getting to the “bottom” raised necessary questions to fuel a
modernizing society. As the Titanic’s deaths and questions raised by the
disaster anticipated the mass horror of the Great War, so too did Shaw’s
journalistic response to Titanic anticipate his journalistic response to the
war—with a far greater cost to his career and society as a whole, but which
delivered, arguably, his most important contributions, some of which
resulted in tangible change. Shaw would collectively tell the truth about
the war—and ask the questions that needed to be asked.42
1913: THE PRELUDE TO A GHASTLY WORLD

On June 27, 1912, approaching three months after the Titanic’s sinking,
Shaw wrote to Beatrice Webb in response to her request for advice for her
and her husband’s ‘War on Poverty’ campaign:
I quite agree with you that minimum wage is too pedantic a phrase to be quite
the motto of a popular movement. The Abolition of Poverty and the Preven-
tion of Destitution have the taint of the workhouse on them. I greatly prefer
The Right to Live; which not only comes out in correct contrast to the
blundering cry of the Right to Work, but is really the fundamental right
which we are asserting. (qtd. in Gahan, Poverty and Inequality, 81)
Shaw’s phrase ‘The Right to Live’ may well have been influenced, even
indirectly, by the Titanic experience. The newly formed (April 15, 1912)
leftist-leaning Daily Herald, edited by Charles Lapworth with start-up
funds from Shaw, labored over the disparaging numbers of the Titanic’s
first-class survivors over second- and third-class passengers, insinuating that
not all were afforded the same rights to survive and live (“The Daily
Herald”; “When the TUC”). To some, the ship’s survival rate served as a
model of capitalist social inequality, which was aggravated by the sensational
press coverage that celebrated the privileged, survivors or not, as romantic
heroes. The right to live for third-class passengers, who were never told
where lifeboats were located, or the White Star Line’s women stewards
turned away from lifeboats by Second Officer Lightoller in favor of first-class
women passengers, rang of inequality (“Lightoller”). But Shaw, of course,
had been focused on social inequality for much of his professional life since
the mid-1880s, increasingly more so since his December 1910 lecture
“Equality.” Of course, the right to live had to be fundamental for all, not
only for the privileged, whether on a passenger vessel or not. And in the
coming years as the horrors expanded, death was to overshadow the right to
live—making that right a much more poignant issue.
In Shaw’s journalistic response to the Titanic, as well as his privately
written comments on the ship’s sinking, he neither mentioned nor alluded
to W. T. Stead’s death, not even with regard to the sensationalizing Titanic
popular press’ absurdly romanticizing accounts (often differing) of his
demise—even though that absurd press coverage was in the vein of the
journalism Stead had pioneered and Shaw was determined to counter.
Shaw’s journalistic nemesis, of sorts, was physically gone, dying like so
many due to the neglect and incompetency of the White Star Line, its
Captain Smith, and the California’s captain—however Stead conducted
himself during the ship’s final two hours.
In 1913, when Shaw updated and published a new edition of the Quin-
tessence of Ibsenism following Ibsen’s death, he altered some of his com-
ments on Stead in Chapter 4, ‘The Womanly Woman.” In the 1891 version,
Shaw wrote of Stead (in reaction to Stead’s Review of Reviews response to
the “Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff): “As he retains his best qualities—faith in
himself, willfulness, conscientious unscrupulousness—he can always make
himself heard” (16). As Patrick G. Hogan and Joseph O. Baylen point out,
in the 1913 edition, Shaw changed the commentary to read: “He [Stead]
had certain Ibsenist qualities: faith in himself, willfulness, conscientious
unscrupulousness, and could always make himself heard” (qtd. in “Shaw
and W. T. Stead, Unexplored,” 144–145). Suggesting that Stead had
“certain Ibsenist qualities” may have been the extent of any softening of
Shaw’s view of Stead, or an acknowledgement that somewhere in Stead’s
efforts was a genuine concern to improve living conditions for many. But
the 1913 edition of Quintessence retained Shaw’s view of Stead’s brutal
moralizing ideal vision of women, as dehumanizing and untrue to women in
1913 as it had been in 1891—and Shaw’s overall view of Stead’s journalism
had not changed with Stead’s death.
As discussed in Chapter 2, Shaw transferred some of the details of Stead’s
purchase of a young girl, Eliza, from her East London mother for his 1885
“Modern Babylon” series, into Professor Higgins’ purchase of Eliza Doo-
little from her working-class father in Pygmalion, premiered in 1914, two
years after the Titanic disaster. Stead’s popular presence, as disturbing as the
act of purchasing a human being is, is found unmistakably in Shaw’s most

popular play.
When Shaw wrote his next major play, Heartbreak House in 1916–1917,
he included a retired mariner named Captain Shotover, who perhaps is the
embodiment of what Titanic’s Captain Smith should have become: an
unknown and eccentric elderly sailor rattling about with his memories. A
more direct nod to the Titanic’s loss, targeting one of its causes at the end of
Act I—as if air bubbling to the surface from the ship’s wrecked and split
hull—appears in a discussion over finances. Shotover asks, “Where is all the
money you had for that patent lifeboat I invented?” He is told that the
amount was minimal with regard to their expenses by his daughter Hesione
Hushabye: “Living at the rate we do, you cannot afford life-saving inven-
tions. Can’t you think of something that will murder half of Europe at one
bang?” (103). Indeed, saving lives did not earn formidable profits, but
rather the opposite, which the White Star Line had subscribed to when
outfitting Titanic in late 1911. But colossal fortunes were indeed made in
manufacturing the implements of the Great War, as Major Barbara’s
Undershaft knew in 1905, which was proving all too real when Heartbreak
House was written. The year following Titanic’s sinking, while perhaps
peaceful for most of Europe, was far too close to the coming war.
The year 1913 saw the First Balkans War fought by Serbia, Bulgaria,
Greece, and Montenegro against the Ottoman Empire. It ended in late May
with the surrender of the Empire’s last European territory. The Second
Balkans War, this time between the former allies over captured lands,
erupted in late June and ended in August—both wars serving as ugly
glimpses of what was to come. As 1913 ended, Shaw’s native city was
embroiled in an industrial war between masters of commerce and
working-class labor, namely the Dublin Lockout, and Shaw was continuing
to increase his attentions on Ireland, international relations, and inequality.
In 1914, Shaw adapted his London lectures on Distribution of Incomes,
part of his inequality agenda, as articles in the New York American news-
paper. On November 22, the second of these articles, “Why We Idolize
Millionaires,” was published. No doubt the Titanic press coverage, with its
idolatry of millionaire passengers, reinforced Shaw’s belief in inequality of
incomes as he noted: “If we have a number of men and a number of them
are richer than other men they will get idolized and simply because they are
richer and for no other reason on earth” (3). Titanic certainly demonstrated
that millionaires, despite the idolatry, were no better than non-wealthy
passengers in the struggle to survive—and the working-class passengers
and crew members did not deserve their deaths any more than the wealthy
who did not survive.43
Yet before Shaw’s 1914 New York articles, at the end of 1913, a sign
appeared that his reputation had survived his unpopular Titanic press letters
of the year before as his likeness was added to Madame Tussaud’s Wax
Museum in December—presumably not exhibited next to Titanic’s Cap-
tain Smith (Collected Letters, III, 230). However, if it had been installed in
the following December, it might have gone into the Rogues Gallery.
Shaw’s most important journalism was on the horizon, and Stead’s press
legacy was soon to prove that it was still very much alive.
NOTES
1. Shaw does not specify in his letter on Stead to Stead’s biographer
Frederick Whyte exactly when Stead’s secretary tried to secure
Shaw’s review services, but given that Shaw was still reviewing
when Stead tried to start his first Daily Paper in 1892, it seems
that Shaw is clearly referring to the second incarnation of the paper
in 1904—when Shaw was definitely not regularly reviewing. Shaw’s
comment on Stead writing about Home Rule as he had in the 1880s
also seems to indicate that Shaw is indeed recalling events in 1904
rather than 1892.
2. Major Barbara premiered in November 1905, and Stead attended a
performance in mid-December, with his review appearing in the
January 1906 Review of Reviews.
3. See Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation for more on
Shaw and the 1913 Dublin Lockout.
4. Shaw’s suggestion that “a Russian police-agent” may have
influenced two London papers in their reporting of his Russian
speech reflects the belief of some Russian activists in London that
the tsar’s police had agents abroad trying to deflate negative views of
the tsar’s rule. Of course, Shaw may not have really believed this.
5. Many of the early demonstrations in 1905 Russia by university
students were led by Professor Pavel Milyukov (Robinson, 248).
Milyukov continued as a moderate reformer until the October 1917
Bolshevik Revolution.
6. By the end of 1905, when a Liberal government came to power,
with Sir Edward Grey as Foreign Secretary, England undertook
efforts to form an alliance with Russia’s autocratic tsar, despite

England’s parliamentary system.
7. Tolstoy, of course, had implemented numerous schemes to alleviate
conditions for the (usually rural) Russian poor.
8. Irish journalist Stephen MacKenna, a close friend of playwright J. M.
Synge, covered the 1905 Russian Revolution and the Russo-
Japanese war from Russia for the New York World. In one of his
leaders, MacKenna wrote: “Russia’s awakening [of its oppressed] is
the great interesting fact of our day. . . . There will be in the universal
intelligence an answering change” (qtd. in Dodds, 25). MacKenna
was soon sacked for leaders that leaned to the left. Perhaps some
London papers also saw the awakening of the working class in Russia
as a cause they did not wish to publicize.
9. Militant socialists throughout Europe, such as James Connolly in
Ireland, were inspired by the revolution in 1905 Russia, and tried to
learn from its defeat. Connolly, in particular, devised a military
strategy for 1916 Dublin from studying the 1905 Russian events.
See Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation.
10. Stead even wrote to Winston Churchill in 1911 claiming to have
received a message from Churchill’s deceased father, Lord Randolph
Churchill, requesting that Stead inform Churchill that his father was
concerned he was straining his nerves (Robinson, 246). Other nota-
bles from the period were also, or soon would be, interested in the
occult, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, who pursued his interest
vigorously after losing a son in the Great War.
11. The discontent among some in Britain with the government’s
efforts for the tsar’s 1909 Cowes visit, prompted 70 MPs to lodge
formal complaints. The government’s then ambassador to Russia
attempted to undermine the detractors by fabricating reports of
“improvements in Russia’s civil liberties record. Confidentially, the
British ambassador [Sir Charles Hardinge] had recently noted that
the [tsar’s] regime had executed 2,835 people in the three years up
to October 1908” (Carter, 319).
12. The number of those lost on the Titanic is not exact, given the many
conflicting conclusions. The number has been fluctuating since the
official United States and British Inquiries convened within weeks of
the sinking. The U.S. Senate Committee Inquiry placed the number
at 1,517 and the British Board of Trade Inquiry listed it as 1,503.
Both inquiries quickly amended their numbers. In fact, the number
of Titanic’s dead is still not agreed upon by historians and probably

never will be. Francis Wilson infers that the number is 1,635 by
stating that the passengers and crew aboard numbered 2,340, and
survivors numbered only 705 (Wilson, 11). Oddly, the number of
those aboard seems to be a more consistent number, yet there is
some evidence that not all private servants of wealthy passengers
were officially listed by the White Star Line (Moloney, 39).
Another important Irish socialist of the early twentieth century who
took some interest in the Titanic, James Connolly, added to the
ship’s death toll as he noted, “seventeen lives were lost on the
Titanic before she left Lagan [Belfast’s River where the ship was
built and launched]” (qtd. in Lynch, 141) Connolly’s interest in the
Titanic was part of his pre-1914 effort to recruit Belfast Harland and
Wolfe shipyard workers for the Irish Transport and General
Workers’ Union. He wrote of the dangerous working conditions
in the yards under British unions, or no unions.
13. As the American Senate hearing into the Titanic’s sinking was
moved to Washington D.C., numerous members of the ship’s
crew were called to Washington to testify. The White Star Line
checked its officials into the plush and historical Willard’s Hotel,
while placing all subpoenaed officers and crew members of the ship
into a less expensive hotel, without making any allowances for the
differences between the ship’s officers and crew members. Second
Officer Charles Lightoller, the highest ranking officer to survive, was
“annoyed at being quartered with his inferiors rather than with the
White Star officials [. . .], and insisted on being moved to the Willard
or provided with a separate floor and dining arrangements” (Wilson,
138–139).
14. On April 24, the Daily Sketch reported that a new operetta by
Richard Fall titled Arms and the Girl, “will be produced at the
Titanic [sic] matinee at the Hippodrome next Tuesday” (Beyceson,
120). The title obviously recalls Shaw’s Arms and the Man. A
musical titled Arms and the Girl was staged in New York in 1950,
but that was not the 1912 operetta.
15. The Daily Sketch on April 25, 1912 reported that Fifth Officer
Lowe, during his testimony before the American Senate Hearing,
had told Ismay, who was interfering with his ability to lower a
lifeboat, “Get the hell out of this” (Bryceson, 125).
16. Another book rushed into print in the United States within weeks of
the ship’s sinking was The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea
Disasters, published by L. T. Myers. This title featured numerous
actual photographs of the ship and some of the ships’ officers.
Curiously, The volume also featured Van Dyke’s “Spiritual Conso-
lation” as the book’s preface.
17. See “HMS Birkenhead,” http://www.wirralglobe.co.uk/search/?
search¼hmsþbirkenhead.
18. The Daily Sketch on April 22 reported that “Nearer, My God, to
Thee” was the “favorite hymn” of the Titanic’s band conductor,
Wallace Hartley (Bryceson, 91).
19. The winter 1911 issue of the British maritime trade publication The
Shipbuilder, which consisted of a special souvenir issue of the White
Star Line’s sister ships Olympic and Titanic (the latter still then
under construction), featured an article “The Arrangement of
[Life]Boat Installations on Modern Ships.” It detailed that the sister
ships were outfitted with Welin double-acting davits: “In the case of
the White Star liners Olympic and Titanic this double-acting type of
davit was fitted throughout to make it possible to double, or even
treble, the number of [life]boats, should such increase ultimately
prove to be necessary” (A Special ‘Olympic’ and ‘Titanic’ Souvenir
Number of ‘The Ship Builder.’ The Ship Builder: 1911, 93–111).
Following Titanic’s sinking, the Olympic carried three boats for
each davit, instead of only one boat per davit, as had been the case
up to and including the sinking.
20. Lady Duff Gordon’s company, “Lucile,” has been resurrected by
her great-great-granddaughter, operating in Britain and on the
internet, as a luxury line of lingerie. The company’s website indicates
that its “origins [lie] in the revolutionary designs of Lady Duff
Gordon” and her “love of romance and sensuality.” The company’s
history statement makes no mention of the Titanic. (http://www.
lucileandco.com). The website does state that Lady Duff Gordon
contributed a regular column to Hearst newspapers, as did W. T.
Stead, briefly. As Boat 1 moved away from the sinking ship, Lady
Duff Gordon is reported to have stated to her secretary, “You have
lost your beautiful nightdress” (qtd. in Wilson, 18).
21. A. L. Solomon was Abraham Solomon, described by Lion Heart
Autographs Company as a “well-to-do New York business man”
(“Lion Heart Autographs,” 10). On September 30, 2015, the
auction house sold Solomon’s ticket to the Titanic’s first-class

Turkish baths weighing chair, as well as the first-class dining
room’s luncheon menu that he used on April 12, 1912—the
Titanic’s last served luncheon (10).
22. http://thechronicleherald.ca/titanic/archive/83016-titanics-passen
gers-chaffed-about-taking-a-boat-excursion; https://www.encyclope
dia-titanica.org/i-was-saved-from-the-titanic-lady-duff-gordon~part-
5.html.
23. The Orsova was built for the Orient Steam Navigation Company in
1909. The ship’s overall length was 553 feet, compared to the
Titanic’s length of 882.75 feet. Based on a photograph of the
Orsova taken prior to the Titanic’s sinking (many shipping lines
added additional lifeboats after the Titanic sank), the Orsova carried
at least 18 lifeboats, plus collapsible boats and/or rafts (“The New
Orient Liners,” 45–46). The Titanic carried 16 lifeboats plus four
collapsible boats.
24. However, there are numerous survivor accounts that claim to have
seen Captain Smith as the ship was sinking, but these accounts are all
contradictory at best, which at least raises doubts about their valid-
ity. According to some academics and historians who have addressed
the Titanic disaster, such as Francis Wilson, there is little evidence of
Captain Smith playing any serious role after he gave the order to
abandon ship. Testifying before the American Senate Inquiry, Sec-
ond Officer Lightoller, the highest ranking surviving officer who
oversaw the lowering of lifeboats on the ship’s port side, declined to
affirm that the order for “Women and Children” was given by
Captain Smith. Instead, he said he adopted the policy because it
was “the rule of human nature” (qtd. in Gracie, “Port,” 93).
25. The Daily Sketch published photographs of the birthplaces of some
of the paper’s professed heroes of the Titanic, such as Captain
Smith’s in Staffordshire on April 23, and Stead’s in Embleton on
April 24 (Bryceson, 108 and 121).
26. The Daily Sketch reported on April 22 that prior to the Titanic’s
maiden voyage, Captain Smith had been asked if “courage and fear-
lessness in the face of death existed among seamen as of old. Captain
Smith declared if any disaster like that to the Birkenhead [sic] hap-
pened they would go down as those men went down” (Bryceson, 98).
27. http://titanicinquiry.org/USInq/AmInq11Stengel01.php; Gracie,
“Starboard,” 183–185.
28. Shaw was not the only intellectual to publicly respond to the sensa-
tionalizing Titanic press coverage. On May 6, 1912, Ethel Ben-
tham, a medical doctor, socialist, and MP, was the speaker at an
Independent Labour Party meeting. The title of her talk was “The
Titanic [sic] and its Lessons.” She stated “that the loss of the Titanic
[sic] seemed to have taken hold of the public imagination and the
Press had exploited the incident with extraordinary zeal. Some of
them might wonder if there would have been so much made if the
passenger list had comprised merely so many emigrants, instead of
having such a proportion of millionaires” (“Dr. Ethel Bentham,”
http://ourhistory-hayes.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/dr-ethel-bentham-
mp-lessons-from.html). Similarly, the leftist-leaning Daily Herald
began printing on the day the Titanic sank, April 15, 1912, and
repeatedly questioned why more crew members and third-class
passengers had not been saved.
29. Shaw’s commentary here with regard to his presumed necessity for
some men to be in the lifeboats most likely means some “crewmen”
should be on board to help row and navigate the boats to safety.
Throughout his career Shaw had been a strong advocate for
women’s rights, with regard to suffrage, marriage, and within the
workplace. His advanced and progressive ideas were part of the
widespread movement for social change of the period.
30. http://www.bartleby.com/246/385.html.
31. “Nelson” refers to Lord Horatio Nelson, the British naval admiral
who defeated and decimated the combined French and Spanish
fleets in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Nelson achieved heroic
stature due to the victory and his death during the battle, on his
flagship, HMS Victory. The triumph for the British navy ended the
threat of a Napoleonic invasion of Britain.
32. The officer who had essentially told the White Star director Ismay to
“get the hell out of that,” Fifth Officer Harold Lowe, was the only
officer manning a lifeboat who returned to the wreckage site to
endeavor to save some of those struggling in the water. His lifeboat
(number 14) rescued four people (Wilson, 18). “Cork jackets” refers
to lifejackets, which in 1912 contained cork for flotation.
33. Shaw’s phrase of the ship “standing on her head” may have been a
satirical reference to the use of “head” reported in the British press
during the American Senate hearing into the ship’s sinking. The
leading Senator of the hearing, William Alden Smith of Michigan,
was decidedly unfamiliar with nautical terms. While questioning a

surviving passenger named Major Peuchen, a yachtsman who had
helped man one of the lifeboats, Senator Smith asked, “whether the
ship went down by the ‘bow or the head’” (qtd. in Wilson, 143).
When Peuchen explained that the bow and the head were the same,
Smith countered by asserting that they were not the same (Wilson,
143).
34. Only lifeboat 14, commanded by Fifth Officer Lowe, returned to
those in the water after Titanic disappeared. All of the lifeboats
distanced themselves from the ship once lowered in order to avoid
being sucked under or swamped as the Titanic finally sank into the
ocean.
35. Lady Duff Gordon occasionally designed theater costumes, as for
the operetta The Merry Widow, in 1908, an operetta that made a star
of Lily Elsie (http://www.edwardianpromenade.com/professions/
fascinating-women-lily-elsie/). Duff Gordon designed costumes
and clothing for Elsie for years, even when other costumes in a
given production were designed by another, or pulled together
from stock costumes. Shaw’s path may have intersected with Lady
Duff Gordon when she most likely provided costumes for Elsie for a
charity matinee on June 9, 1916 of J. M. Barrie’s The Admirable
Crichton, to benefit the Star and Garter Home for Disabled Soldiers.
The matinee performance featured Elsie, as well as numerous noted
theater artists, including Shaw. Others in the cast were Ellen Terry,
George Alexander, Vesta Tilly, and Gerald du Maurier (“Lily
Elsie”).
36. To provide some perspective regarding Titanic’s Boat 1, the author
has a 22-foot boat certified by the United States Coast Guard to
carry up to seven people.
37. Lady Duff Gordon also referred to her assistant as “Miss Frank” in
the newspaper accounts of her survival, as in the April 20–22 papers
(http://thechronicleherald.ca/titanic/archive/83016-titanics-pas
sengers-chaffed-about-taking-a-boat-excursion). Lady Duff Gordon’s
assistant’s full name was Mabel Francatelli. In a letter written by
Francatelli six months after the sinking, on New York Plaza Hotel
stationary, she wrote: “We do hope you have now quite recovered
from the terrible experience. I am afraid our nerves are still bad,
as we had such trouble & anxiety added to our already awful
experience by the very unjust inquiry when we arrived in London”

(qtd. in “Lion Heart Autographs,” 10).
38. Interestingly, on May 27, 1912, seven days after testifying before the
British Board of Trade Inquiry, Lady Duff Gordon wrote a brief
letter to an unidentified friend: “Dear Old Friend, How kind of you
to send me a cable of sympathy to New York on our safety.
According to the way we’ve been treated by England on our return
we didn’t seem to have done the right thing in being saved at all!!!!
Isn’t it disgraceful” (“Lady Duff Gordon Letter”).
39. Conan Doyle, like Stead, believed in séances and communications
with the departed. The former had been an early medical contribu-
tor to Stead’s Review of Reviews, but clashed with Stead over being
assigned to investigate a medical practitioner in Italy who claimed he
was successfully treating cancer. Conan Doyle, a medical doctor as
well as author, was dismissive of the claim (Robinson, 173–174).
40. Robert Cunningham Graham had been a Liberal MP during the
1880s, but was mostly a socialist, and later a Scottish nationalist.
He was arrested in 1887 during the Trafalgar Square riot, London’s
Bloody Sunday. When he was suspended from the House of
Commons in December 1888 for protesting on behalf of the work-
ing class, he responded to the House Speaker by saying, “I never
withdraw”—a phrase Shaw borrowed for the character Sergius in
Arms and the Man, 1894 (http://www.clanmacfarlanegenealogy.
info/genealogy/TNGWebsite/getperson.php?personID¼I10819&
tree¼CC).
41. Shaw’s near drowning experience during the summer of 1907 in
Wales (during the Fabian Society’s first Summer School) aside, he
did not really know what the experience must have been like for
those in the freezing water after Titanic sank. While undoubtedly
some who were in the water, free of the ship, drowned, most—
especially those wearing cork lifejackets—died of hypothermia in the
frigid North Atlantic water. The sustained cries and screams from
those in the water perhaps testified to the agonizing experience—
and yet, only one lifeboat returned to the site of the sinking in order
to rescue those in the water.
42. By the end of 1912, on December 6, Shaw was joined by Arthur
Conan Doyle on the speakers’ platform at a meeting of Irish Prot-
estants in favor of Irish Home Rule, at London’s Memorial Hall.
The meeting was organized as a response to the Covenant that had
been signed by Ulster Protestants resisting Home Rule. As the

Liberal government of Herbert Asquith was approaching a new
Home Rule Bill, the Ulster Covenant seemed to be leading Ireland
toward civil war, or at the very least, armed resistance to Home Rule
by Ulster Protestants against the country they wished to remain
governed by. Shaw’s speech, famous for stating “I would rather be
burned at the stake by Irish Catholics than protected by English-
men,” was published in pamphlet form (“The Protestants of Ire-
land,” 81). Conan Doyle’s remarks, like Shaw’s, received the most
press coverage among the various speakers—which included a for-
mer British army captain from Protestant Ulster named Jack White,
who would play a role the following year in training locked out
Dublin workers in the Irish Citizen Army (Carr, 224). Conan
Doyle stated that “We people of Irish blood are always running to
the past to take sides” and then claimed that the Irish Catholic
majority would be fair to the Protestant community (qtd. in Carr,
225). Conan Doyle, who had for many years been against Home
Rule, announced his conversion in a letter to the Belfast Telegraph in
September 1911, writing as one aware of the growing European
militarism: “a solid loyal Ireland is the one thing which the Empire
needs to make it impregnable, and I believe that the men of the
North will have a patriotism so broad and enlightened that they will
understand this, and will sacrifice for the moment their racial and
religious feelings” (Conan Doyle, 579). This was an about-face for
Conan Doyle from his 1903 article “Great Britain” in the Fort-
nightly Review in which he argued that Ireland needed Britain’s
protection in the next war, and would be unable to survive econom-
ically on its own—which was disputed in Dublin’s The Irish Review
in June 1912, despite Conan Doyle’s 1911 letter in the Belfast
Telegraph (“From Celtic Twilight to Revolutionary Dawn: The
Irish Review 1911–1914,” Century Ireland, http://www.rte.ie/
centuryireland/index.php/articles/from-celtic-twilight-to-revolu
tionary-dawn). Conan Doyle, like Shaw, had long been concerned
about the prospects of a European war.
43. Special thanks to Peter Gahan for providing a copy of Shaw’s
New York American article, “Why We Idolize Millionaires.”
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“Capt. Smith’s Last Words.” Daily Mail, April 20, 1912, 3.
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New York: HarperCollins, 2011.
CHAPTER 5
War
On May 22, 1913, more than a year after W. T. Stead’s death, Bernard
Shaw wrote to Beatrice Webb concerning his insistence on not signing
articles he supplied for the New Statesman journal that Beatrice and hus-
band Sidney Webb had recently founded, with financial assistance from
Shaw. His reasoning was that it was better for the journal’s editor Clifford
Sharp, as “well-known signatures play him off the stage,” and suggested
that “half of our business is to train our successors” (Collected Letters, III,
176–177). Unlike in the 1880s and 1890s when Shaw advocated that
signing his name meant taking responsibility for important statements
while he established his voice, Shaw now felt that not all of his articles in
the New Statesman required his signature. Besides, “I have had enough of
being the funny man and the privileged lunatic of a weekly paper. If it were
still necessary for me to express the ordinary body of collectivist doctrine as
it was in earlier days, I should slave away at it wearily but resignedly” (176).
In the same letter, Shaw stated that his contributions to the Webbs’ journal
made other editors, namely old friend and colleague from The Star H. W.
Massingham, more desirous of his press letters. Massingham had resurfaced
since being ousted from the Daily Chronicle during the Boer War, and now
edited The Nation, where in May 1913 he published Shaw’s letter based on
his important “The Case for Equality” lecture (Laurence, “Notes,” Col-
lected Letters, III, 176). While Shaw enjoyed a few unsigned paragraphs in
the New Statesman in 1913, he still relished his ability to place his important
signed letters in various papers and journals. However, that ability would be
largely threatened once the Great War commenced. Shaw performed an

Journalism, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49007-6_5
important journalistic role during the war with great conviction, even
though doing so jeopardized his career as a dramatist. Shaw voiced unpop-
ular views of a war and questioned British policy while the conflict was
raging, echoing Stead’s position during the Boer War, when the latter’s
career was nearly curtailed.
Shaw’s most immediate response to the Great War, and the calamity it
represented on so many levels, was a journalistic response; his War plays
would follow. In responding to earlier sensational press-generated public
hysteria, the Whitechapel frenzy and the Titanic tragedy, and the decades-
long march of European militarism, Shaw attempted to undermine and
negate the melodramatic foundation of sensationalizing shock journalism.
This would continue with his journalistic response to the Great War,
although this response was far more complex than his earlier journalistic
efforts—and much more costly. Nonetheless, what Shaw recognized as war
approached in the months prior to the first shots being fired, was a colossal
coming together of the social elements he had been journalistically coun-
tering since the 1880s. Once the elements were together, they turned what
might have been yet another localized Balkans squabble—as that of the
1885 setting of Shaw’s 1894 play Arms and the Man—into the long-feared
European and World War. Shaw’s long distrust and animosity for the
Liberal Party climaxed with Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government’s secre-
tive and non-democratic Foreign Office and foreign policy (1906–1916).
Combined with this, or part and parcel of it, was the long-standing jour-
nalistic mindset that guaranteed unswerving support at any cost for the
Liberal Party, and later the government it formed, while propagandizing the
growing militarist campaign for war under the guise of preserving the peace,
and preparing for conflict—and achieving neither. Instead, the popular
Stead-inspired press secured unquestioning public support for the govern-
ment leading Britain into a horrific war directed by inept military leaders.
The aristocracy’s free hand in both the Foreign Office and War Office was,
at the very least, dangerous for a supposedly democratic country. Added to
this was the fact that the government’s Foreign and War Policies were
mostly supported by the Conservative press that had longed for a war
with Germany—leaving no popular press to question developments. All of
this was assured by the Defense of the Realm Act (DORA), which the War
Office put into effect once war was declared. It placed the free press under
government supervision. For Shaw, this was all dangerous for a democratic
country. The sensationalizing journalism that Stead had pioneered now
joined the government in threatening democracy under the guise of
WAR 155
patriotism. To counter such press and the government it served, it would

take a monumental effort from Shaw that would include his journalistic
masterwork Common Sense About the War.
In the countering process, Shaw’s journalism, and the like-minded war
journalism that eventually emerged from other sources, questioned both
the government’s and the popular press’ absurdities and lies, while
attempting to seek the truth. Shaw strove to ensure that the war could be
understood as something more than a way to kill without mercy and provide
massive casualty lists. As with the Titanic, the truth needed to be discovered
and heard in order to make sense of the devastating loss of life and under-
stand why it happened. This truth-telling ideal was the same scenario that
Shaw had tried to engage with in 1888 and later amid the morality fever that
had buried Parnell. For the Great War, telling the truth to undermine
outdated values was the continuing path to modernization. Shaw was to
play his role in the process.
FOREIGN POLICY, GREY, AND AUGUST 1914

Shaw’s Great War journalism began before the conflict started, when he
contributed an important signed letter to the left-leaning The Daily Chron-
icle, published as “Armaments and Conscription: A Triple Alliance Against
War” on March 18, 1913 by editor Robert Donald—another journalist who
had started on The Star under T. P. O’Connor in 1888. Shaw included the
letter in his 1930 collection of Great War writings, What I Really Wrote
About the War. He saw in March 1913 the potential of the catastrophic war
on the horizon, and believed that if it erupted it would be because of wrong-
headed or even incompetent Liberal government foreign policy. Rather
than blindly supporting the government, ranting an anti-German diatribe,
or saying nothing, Shaw began his Daily Chronicle letter: “The great secret
of our foreign policy is that we have no foreign policy. From time to time
the Secretary for Foreign Affairs [Sir Edward Grey] announces to the House
of Commons that we are trapped in some alliance which we had not the
faintest intention of making” (8).
Shaw then outlined that England, as part of its secret or seeimgnly
non-existant foreign policy, had sided with Japan during the Russo-
Japanese War of 1904–1905, and would have fought against Russia had
anyone sided with that country. As a consequence of trying to subsequently
repair relations with Russia after its humiliating defeat at the hands of Japan,
England entered into an Anglo-Russian agreement. This agreement, in the
European scenario, placed Britain at odds with Germany, a country that

was, for Shaw, connected more to Britain than autocratic Russia. Also in his
letter Shaw alluded to the 1909 meeting at Cowes between Tsar Nicholas II
and Edward VII, as orchestrated by Foreign Secretary Grey—which was
followed by England entering into “quite a genuine entente with France.”
Shaw even suggested that “all of these ententes offer us not the smallest
guarantee that there is not at the Foreign Office some signed alliance with
the bitterest enemies of the very neighbours on whom we are showering our
cordialities” (10). Shaw then argued that there should be a triple alliance
with Germany and France, “the terms being that if France attack
[s] Germany we [Britain] combine with Germany to crush France, and if
Germany attack[s] France, we combine with France to crush Germany”
(11). A common-sense plan, if peace was desired.
Shaw submitted a further signed letter on his perception of Britain’s
foreign policy on the eve of war titled “The Peace of Europe and How to
Attain It” to The Daily News and Leader, where editor A. G. Gardiner
published it on January 1, 1914. Shaw again boldly criticized the foreign
policy under Grey, who once admitted that W. T. Stead “amused me” (qtd.
in Griffiths, 117). Shaw wrote:
We provide our foreign minister with an enormously expensive sword in order

that he may be in a position to step into the European arena and urge
England’s needs and claims, backed by the sword compelling attention to
them. And lo! He has no needs and no claims, and stumbles about tripping
over his own scabbard when he is not tripping over somebody else’s. (15)
Shaw’s portrait of the ineptitude of Grey and his office continued, as

there seemed to be no clear policy:
And when we claim that foreign policy should be controlled by democracy

instead of by aristocratic foreign secretaries and their retinues of Nuts [pre-
sumably Grey’s Foreign Office staff], nothing comes of it, because the democ-
racy knows well that it is as destitute of a policy as any Foreign Office in the
world. Complaints of expenditures on the navy, tags from Tennyson, and
Christmas-card Pacifism do not make a policy, and will not prevent the
building of a single Dreadnought [modern battleship] nor avert conscription.
(15)
The mention of naval expenditures was an allusion to Stead’s 1884 “The

Truth about the Navy” series that helped propel Britain into the armaments
WAR 157
race, while Tennyson’s romantic patriotism and Christmas card sentiments

were useless to prevent the further building of Dreadnoughts. Shaw
believed that peace efforts prior to 1914 (including Stead’s long work to
undo his Navy series) had achieved nothing.1 Then Shaw, in his Daily News
letter, again proposed the idea of a triple alliance between Britain, France,
and Germany as the only practical plan to prevent the coming war. Six
months later it was June in Sarajevo.
As is well understood, the assassination of Austria-Hungary’s Archduke
Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo set the events that ignited the
European powers into war. The machinations and alliances that had been
cultivated by the major countries under the pretense of maintaining peace
were suddenly used for manufacturing a colossal war. As Shaw had feared,
Britain’s foreign policy under Grey (a preposterous by-product of 20-plus
years of propaganda efforts by Stead to improve Anglo-Russian relations,
exemplified by his pro-Russian tsar inclinations), now crept toward its
fulfillment as both Britain and Russia were bound to France, and France
to them.2 On July 5–6, Germany pledged its support to Austria-Hungary
against Serbia. Rather than recognizing the issues at hand with its foreign
policy agreements, Asquith’s government in London continued to focus
solely on reaching a Home Rule agreement for Ireland that somehow could
be supported by Ulster Unionists to settle the centuries-long Irish question.
The efforts broke down on the 24th, the day Austria-Hungary issued an
ultimatum to Serbia to comply with or face war; an ultimatum Serbia could
not agree to. On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. The next
day Russia mobilized its armies to support Serbia.
The British Parliament finally began to focus on the growing European
crisis surrounding Serbia—perhaps believing that it would only be another
localized conflict. Margaret MacMillan, in The War That Ended the Peace,
writes that at this time “Grey had been slow—too slow—to grasp the extent
of the danger that was looming in the Balkans and unwilling to admit to
himself that Britain was in any way constrained by its membership of the
Triple Entente” (589). France had less ambiguity regarding the Entente
and made its position clear that they would fight with Russia. Tsar Nicholas
II then ordered a partial mobilization of Russian armies against Austria-
Hungary, which led Germany to demand that Russia stand down. By this
time, France was pressing Grey and Britain to state and pledge its intent to
stand by France and Russia if attacked by Germany. Grey continued to stall,
which MacMillan argues was due to the split in Asquith’s cabinet with
regard to the crisis and war (608). British public opinion was being directed
to support Russia and France, with the London press leading the charge
with the overuse of the morality card, as if still condemning Parnell. The
Times on July 30 and 31 proclaimed that it was Britain’s “moral obligation
to France and Russia” to oppose a continental shift in “Germany’s favour”
(MacMillan, 610). On July 31, Russia commenced full mobilization. Still,
there were calls, half-hearted or sincere, among leaders, even the tsar, for a
peace meeting or convention to somehow avert war. On August 1, Shaw
again addressed the growing crisis, now only hours away. Shaw’s letter,
“The Madness of This War,” with its reasoned and detached style that Shaw
had been perfecting since the late 1880s, appeared in the pro-Labour Party
Daily Citizen under editor Frank Dilnot, and it cut to what was to follow:
A symposium on the madness of war at this moment is about as timely and

sensible as a symposium on the danger of damp sheets would be if London
were on fire.
If war is madness, we should have thought of that before. It is no use stock
piling up armaments and blustering for years and then, when the first shot is
fired, suddenly joining the Quakers. We have made our bed and must lie on it.
To us and to Western civilisation the worst calamity that can occur is a war
between France and Germany, or between either of them and England. All
our diplomacy and all our power should be directed at its prevention. And to
that end there is only one thing that our diplomacy can do, and that is to
represent that, in such a war, England must take her part and is ready to take
her part with the object of making a speedy end of it at the expense of the
aggressor.
Shaw was not only reacting to the madness, and public shock at the
prospects of war, but also to Grey’s and the government’s reluctance to
make its intentions clear. The day before, on July 31, the Daily Mirror,
under the header “BRITAIN’S GREAT OBJECT,” reported Grey’s comments to
the House of Commons on July 30: “The outstanding facts . . . are much
the same as yesterday. We continue to pursue one great object—the pres-
ervation of peace—and for this purpose we are keeping in close touch with
other Powers. In thus keeping in touch we have, I am glad to say, had no
difficulty” (3). Grey’s ambiguous comments were perceived by Shaw as
confirmation that Grey had done nothing and had no policy to pursue; the
paper offered no commentary on them and raised no questions. On the
same page, the paper also ran the header, “BRITAIN SHOWS UNITED FRONT IN
WAR PERIL” (3). The blind, unthinking, and non-critical support of Grey and
the government’s position was, in retrospect, as dangerous as Germany’s
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demand to Russia regarding its mobilization. Shaw continued in his August

1 response to the crisis:
If it is quite clear that our intervention is certain and will be resolute, a Western
war will not be undertaken except as a last resort and at an appalling risk. With
that responsibility on us those who have nothing more helpful to do than to
sing Christmas carols had better hold their tongues.
But it is important that our statesmen and diplomatists should understand
that there is a strong and growing body of public opinion to which all war is
abhorrent, and which will suffer it now only as a hideous necessity arising out
of past political bargains [the Entente] in which people have had no part and
the country no interest. The alliance between the revolutionary Government
of France and the reactionary Government of Russia is a monstrous and
unnatural product of cosmopolitan finance. One of its threatened conse-
quences at present is the forcing by circumstances of England into the ranks
of Russian despotism in defence of a Serbian assassination. That is not a
position of which we can feel proud, though it serves us richly right for
allowing it to be brought about by our political apathy and stupidity.
Shaw again chastised the Liberal government for placing Britain in such
an unenviable position as being allied to Russia, and was adamant that the
only way to now avoid an all-encompassing European war was a statement
of Britain’s intent from the government (namely from Grey) in support of
France, rather than merely staying in “close touch with Other Powers.”3
Shaw believed that such a statement would force Germany to back away
from a war with France. Shaw ended his letter with a warning:
We muddled our way in and we may have to fight our way out. The best of us
will consent to the inevitable, sullenly and angrily; and this had better be taken
carefully into account by statesmen and journalists who may feel tempted to
deck this horrible emergency in the rhetorical trappings of enthusiasm and
patriotism. (“The Madness of This War,” 159–160)
Shaw’s grasp of the developing situation was concise and astute—as was his
warning to politicians and journalists not to irresponsibly fan war fever by
enshrouding the calamity in “enthusiasm and patriotism,” as the press had
done with the Titanic catastrophe. Such irresponsibility in a modern and
mechanized war would lead to the deaths of many who would never know
why they sacrificed their lives. By 1914, Shaw well knew the dangers of a
sensationalizing press, even more so if inflamed further by politicians using
the press to incite the public into blindly accepting a war for nothing but
King and Country, or for some other patriotic placard. On the same day as
Shaw’s August 1 letter, Germany, perhaps believing Britain would not
support Russia and France since Britain had not declared any definite
intentions one way or the other, declared war on Russia.4
On August 3, Grey addressed Parliament—echoing the July 30 and
31 Times—claiming that it was Britain’s moral right to support France
and to support Belgium’s neutrality. That day, after Belgium refused to
allow German troops passage through its country to reach the frontier of
France, German forces invaded Belgium as well—and Britain provocatively
mobilized its fleet. Grey had assured the French ambassador that this would
happen—it was effectively a declaration of war on Germany. The next day,
as Britain made that declaration official, Shaw and wife Charlotte arrived for
an extended stay in Torquay, having altered their original plans to attend
the International Socialist Congress in Vienna due to the war (Weintraub,
Journey, 26).
Part of the couple’s intended stay in Torquay was to afford Shaw time to
work on his Redistribution of Income lectures for the Fabian Society
(Gahan, Poverty and Inequality, 174). However, with the European devel-
opments, work on the lectures had to be shared with Shaw’s journalistic
response to the war’s early months. On August 5, the London popular press
first published the enlistment call, “Your King and Country Need You”
(Daily Telegraph, 9). Still, Shaw wasted little time as Stanley Weintraub
reveals, in Journey to Heartbreak; one of Shaw’s first responses to the war,
perhaps with the now activated DORA in mind, was an unsigned paragraph
in the New Statesman. He argued that the real enemy to “the three most
enlightened and illustrious communities” was Russia, “medieval in thought
though modern in its appliances of war, that might, should they [Britain,
France, and Germany] exhaust each other, threaten them all” (27–28; qtd.
in Weintraub, 28).5 Events, as Shaw anticipated, began to intensify.
On August 6, Britain lost its first ship in the conflict, HMS Amphion,
when it struck a German naval mine with a loss of approximately 150 sailors.
The casualties were reported days later, after the first reports of the sinking,
on August 10, in the Daily Telegraph. The paper’s same edition also
reported: “Britain’s soldiers prepare for War, but our reports from Europe
suggest our Allies are coping well in the interim” (1). The war for Britain
was at hand, even as the press propaganda attempted to cover Britain’s
exceedingly slow army mobilization—which most likely was due to inept
organizational planning from its highest ranking officers. On August
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11, Shaw published his first signed letter since Britain had declared war, in
London’s Daily News and Leader. While then edited by Gardiner, the paper
was owned by Quaker chocolate magnate George Cadbury, revealing little
of Quaker values with the War. The title of Shaw’s letter was “The Peril of
Potsdam: Our Business Now.”6 Shaw knew his voice was needed, and now
that Englishmen and Irishmen were dying with more to follow, there
needed to be something else, Shaw believed, than “King and Country”
and defending Belgium’s neutrality to kill and die for. To achieve a higher
purpose, questions needed to be raised, despite DORA, which most popular
presses willingly followed; to comply was consistent with their Stead-style
sensationalizing. Shaw stated:
Now that we are at war, it is well that we should know what the war is about.
To begin with, we are not at war because Germany made an infamous
proposal that we should allow her to violate Belgium neutrality. If it had
suited us to accept that proposal, we could have found plenty of reasons for
accepting it—the advocates of our own neutrality have found some of them
already—no more infamous than the diplomatic reasons we have been given
in the past for courses which happen to us.
No doubt Shaw was alluding to imperial Britain’s history of occupying and

colonizing numerous countries, as Belgium itself had done historically, and
holding them with standing armies. Shaw was perhaps referring to his long-
held objection to Grey’s foreign policy, as in the Denshawai incident in
Egypt shortly after Grey took office.7 Shaw continued, stressing the discon-
tinuance of the illusion that Belgium’s neutrality was the reason for war:
Let us therefore drop it. Our national trick of virtuous indignation is tiresome
enough in peaceful party strife at home. At war it is ungallant and
unpardonable. Let us take our pugnacity to the field and leave our hypocrisy
and our bad blood at home. They weaken the heroic fight and encourage the
blackguard. This war is a Balance of Power war and nothing else.8 If our side is
victorious the result will be an overbalance of Power in favour of Russia, far
more dangerous to all the other combatants than the one we are fighting to
possess.9
Shaw would expand his views on the war as a balance of power in November
1914 in further journalistic efforts. Continuing his Potsdam letter, Shaw
assured his British readers:
This need not discourage us in the field. On the contrary, we shall punch
Prussia’s Head all the worse more gloriously if we do it for the honour and not
for the malice, meaning to let her up when we have knocked the militarism out
of her and taught her to respect us. Prussian militarism has bullied us for forty
years, and a month ago neither Germany nor France believed that we [Britain]
would fight when it came to the point. That was why there was such wild
explosion and delightful surprises when the French Chamber learned that we
were game after all.
Seemingly, Shaw was alluding to the fact that had Grey made Britain’s
alliance with France known publicly—particularly a month sooner—a
European war might have been avoided. But instead, events escalated and
“we had to take off our coats and sail in.” Then Shaw turned his attention to
the working class, whom he knew had been ignored in Asquith’s govern-
ment’s decision, yet would need to carry the greatest burden in fighting the
war:
Meanwhile, the political influence of organized labour at home must not

be wasted in idle and exasperating platitudes about the wickedness of war
and the extravagance of big armaments, and the simplicity of non-intervention
and all other splintered planks of the old Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform
platform . . . .
The wickedness of war is a reason for keeping out of war; but, the field once
taken, it is not a practicable reason for betraying your allies and your country
by throwing down your arms and kneeling to pray; and people, who will not
recognize this stand aside and are no longer listened to. The extravagance of
armaments is an income-tax payer’s grievance, not a workman’s grievance.
Every Labour member who knows the A. B. C. of Labour economics
knows that we might have doubled and trebled and quintupled our present
armament within the last ten years without one single useful person in the
country being a penny the worse, and a good many wasters and idlers and
their retinues would be better for having less to waste and more honourable
employment. [An echo of Major Barbara’s Undershaft’s Armaments.] As to
non-intervention, it is an insular superstition. The modern Labour movement
knows that Labour Politics are international and that if Militarism is to be
struck down the mortal blow must be aimed at Potsdam [where the Kaiser
Wilhelm II resided].
Shaw was trying adamantly to reach the working class, particularly orga-
nized labor and proletariat socialists, and move them into supporting the
fight against Germany. He knew well that enough militant socialists would
WAR 163
rail against the war as an imperialistic and capitalistic venture to hamper

military recruitment in certain locales. Writing on August 8, 1914, in
Dublin’s labor and radical paper the Irish Worker under the title “Our
Duty in the Crisis,” socialist leader James Connolly, soon to be the Acting
Secretary of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, wrote:
Should the working class of Europe, rather than slaughter each other for the
benefit of kings and financiers, proceed tomorrow to erect barricades all over
Europe, to break up bridges and destroy the transport services that war might
be abolished, we should be perfectly justified in following such a glorious
example and contributing our aid to the final dethronement of the vulture
classes that rule and rob the world. (4)
While staying in Torquay, as Weintraub relates, Shaw had his usual

newspapers, as well as others, delivered (Journey, 35). Perhaps Shaw had
direct knowledge of Connolly’s anti-war journalism; if not, he knew how
some of the militant socialists, like Connolly, would respond. Shaw certainly
knew of Connolly having met him on November 1, 1913 when they shared
the speakers’ platform in a London rally on behalf of Irish workers, and their
imprisoned union leader, during the Dublin Lockout. Shaw had then called
for the arming of Dublin workers and two weeks later Connolly announced
the formation of what would become the Irish Citizen Army.10 Reaching
the proletariat would continue to be pressing for Shaw, but in “The Peril of
Potsdam,” Shaw added:
If the Government had a real foreign policy, Mr. Asquith might have said
fearlessly to Prussian militarism: If you attempt to smash France, we two will
smash you if we can. We have had enough of the Germany of Bismarck, which
all the world loathes, and we will see whether we cannot revive the Germany
of Goethe and Beethoven which has not an enemy on earth. But if you will
drop your mailed fist nonsense and be neighbourly, we will guarantee you
against Russia, just as heartily as we now guarantee France against you.
Shaw then concluded by appealing for a constructive policy:
This is not a time for idle recrimination: but it is a time for showing that there
is such a thing as an intelligent and patriotic foreign policy—patriotic in the
European as well as in the insular sense—and that our Governments are too
much under the influence of the Stock Exchange to find it. History will not
excuse us because, after making war inevitable, we run round at the last
moment begging everybody not to make a disturbance.
Our business is to convince Potsdam that it cannot trample down France,
England, Belgium and Holland; and must pay reasonable damages for having
tried to; and, second, to convince Russia that she must not take advantage of
the lesson to subdue Germany.11
The day after “The Peril of Potsdam” was published in the Daily News
and Leader, Shaw wrote privately to fellow Fabian Beatrice Webb: “I
suppose you saw my article in the Daily News yesterday,” and asserted
that “Grey’s virtual declaration of war (the assurance to the French ambas-
sador that our fleet would co-operate [defend the French Coast]) the day
before it was communicated to the mob [British public], including the
cabinet itself. From all I can gather, this was the real provocation” (Collected
Letters, III, 244). Shaw was focusing his efforts to reveal the real causes for
the war, for its proper management, and was determined to expose what he
saw as the non-democratic war decisions being made by Grey. He added in
his August 12, 1914 letter to Beatrice Webb,
It seems to me that we have to keep steadily opening the eyes of the public to
the fact that it was the policy of the Franco-Russian alliance and the class
personality of Grey that led us into this mess, and that we forced Germany to
fight for her life. And the first step is to emphasize the fact that Asquith and
Grey told the country a thundering lie. (Collected Letters, III, 245)
In his essay “Censored and Embedded Shaw: Print Culture and Shavian
Analysis of Wartime Media,” Daniel O’Leary writes: “Shaw fully appreci-
ated the political and historical significance of his public utterance
[s]. Shaw’s wartime prose also reveals that he felt a sense of responsibility
to contribute to the war effort despite ambivalence about its causes”
(169–170). This contribution, especially given Shaw’s wide reputation in
the year of Pygmalion’s London and New York premieres, was exceptional
and far-reaching, which no doubt Shaw counted on. His press letter “The
Peril of Potsdam” was not only read in London—it was published whole or
in part in various papers and journals throughout the British Empire, as in
the New Zealand Truth on November 7, 1914, and a month earlier in South
Australia’s The Burra Record, October 4. Commenting on Shaw’s letter,
The Burra Record noted: “It was to be expected that Mr. G. Bernard Shaw
WAR 165
would have something original to say about the war”—original indeed

(“Views on the War,” 1).
In London, W. T. Stead’s old Review of Reviews, now edited by Stead’s
son, included Shaw’s “Peril of Potsdam” in its October–November 1914
issue, coupled with a Stead editorial on the coming danger to Britain from
German zeppelins. Back on August 15, Bertrand Russell published his “The
Rights of the War” in the pro-Labour Party Nation, still edited by
Massingham. Russell lamented that the British public had moved from
being a “peaceful and humane” people
in a few days down the steep slope to primitive barbarism, letting loose, in a
moment, the instincts of hatred and blood-lust against which the whole fabric
of society has been raised. “Patriots” in all countries claim this brutal orgy as a
noble determination to vindicate the right; reason and mercy are swept away
in one great flood of hatred (qtd. in Carpenter, 31).
The hatred was being inflamed by the popular press, particularly in

London, that demonized Germans and unquestioningly accepted Asquith
and Grey’s leadership. This frenzy increased as the German army crushed
Belgian military resistance once it had destroyed the defensive forts near the
border. On August 22, Shaw responded to criticism of his “The Peril of
Potsdam” in The Saturday Review, but on the next day, the 23rd, the British
Expeditionary Force first engaged German forces in Belgium at the Battle of
Mons. British losses were approximately 1,600—the heightening war hys-
teria was entering a new phase, although one anticipated through a micro-
cosm in 1912.12
The August 25 Daily Mirror, owned by Lord Northcliffe, ran a photo-
graph on page 1 of Earl Leven and Melville, of the Royal Scots Greys, part of
the British Expeditionary Force at Mons. It reported that Leven had been
“dangerously wounded” (1). On page 3 of the paper, a handful of
other British casualties were listed without photographs, including a
re-listing of Leven, but most accounted for were not aristocrats, and one
non-commissioned officer was included. Providing a prominent listing and
photograph of Leven on page 1 echoed the popular press’ romantic empha-
sis on aristocrats and the privileged during the Titanic press coverage two
years earlier, and the listing of commissioned and non-commissioned offi-
cers on page 3 reflected the romanticizing of Titanic’s officers. The main
article on page 3 of the Daily Mirror included headers on British soldiers
“Holding Their Own,” “Their Usual Coolness” (3). What was not
mentioned was that the British Expeditionary Force was forced to retreat
during the Battle of Mons, their first contact with the enemy.
The next day, August 26, Shaw wrote again to Beatrice Webb, prompted
by her apparent disagreement with him on Grey and Asquith, believing, as
the popular press dictated, that while war existed the government needed to
be followed and unquestioned. Shaw wrote:
I shall have to do another article for the Daily News; for nobody else seems to
have any power of seeing what is really going on.13 When even you can
conceive nothing better than Grey and Co, I begin to despair of the intellec-
tuals. You swallow Denshawai, . . . you swallow McKenna [Home Secretary
who introduced the Cat and Mouse Bill in 1913, allowing for the arrest,
release, and re-arrest of suffragettes and other political activists by the gov-
ernment], you swallow Asquith’s declaration that Woman is an inferior and
soulless species, you swallow these blazing lies about our peaceable intentions,
and your conclusion is that the cabinet is quite a fair average sample of
character and courage and enlightenment . . . . When will I cure you of your
inveterate idolatry of ambitious and successful plutocrats? (Collected Letters,
III, 247)
On August 30, the conservative Times, also one of Northcliffe’s papers

that fully supported the government’s war policy, reported on more British
losses at Mons and claimed that the British Army in Belgium was threatened
unless more men enlisted. Lord Northcliffe (Dublin-born Alfred Harms-
worth) utilized this form of politicized journalism consistently on
war-related matters but also throughout his career as a journalist and
owner of popular papers and periodicals. In 1893, with his brother Harold,
Harmsworth launched the Union Jack, Pluck, and Halfpenny Marvel,
largely sensational adventure weeklies “targeting an adolescent male read-
ership” (Winston, 119). Greg Winston, in Joyce and Militarism, argues that
“Harmsworth undoubtedly saw military recruitment as an ulterior motive
for his boy’s papers, just as he would later use his greatest media acquisi-
tions, the Daily Mail and the Times, to rally public support for British entry
into the First World War” (121–122). In fact, in 1909, Harmsworth
published a series of articles in the Daily Mail by Manchester Fabian Robert
Blatchford that warned of Germany’s intent to invade Britain; the articles,
which proved very popular, sensationally flamed anti-German sentiment
while calling for greater military preparedness. Harmsworth’s popular pub-
lications no doubt contributed to the march toward and early execution of
the war.
WAR 167
In Joyce and Militarism Winston argues that an overwhelming factor of

James Joyce’s fiction is a thematic rejection and assault against rampant
European militarism from 1890 through the Great War, and details how
Joyce responded in his fiction to Harmsworth’s relentless propagating of
militarism in the boys journals to his use of daily newspapers to propagan-
dize Britain’s war effort. In 1916, Harmsworth published his Lord
Northcliffe’s War Book—a journalistic-style book in the Stead tradition of
capitalizing on a “hot” topic. The book was a collection of Northcliffe’s
articles on the war, consistent with his editorial strategies in his papers. On
romanticizing and glamorizing British Army tank crews, Northcliffe writes:
“young daredevils who, fully knowing that they will be a special mark for
every kind of Prussian weapon, enter upon their tank in a sporting spirit with
the same cheery enthusiasm as they would show for football” (qtd. in
Winston, 122). Such was exactly what Shaw had warned against on August
1 in “The Madness of this War,” and such undoubtedly led young English-
men to their deaths or horrific injuries—decidedly not football. However,
recruitment of more troops was soon achieved, whether for the slaughter
trenches of Europe in 1914 or in Gallipoli in 1915—and Northcliffe used
his printed media accordingly to glorify “the Continental battlefield for the
general public” (Winston, 122).
Shaw’s former editor of The Star during the Whitechapel murders, T. P.
O’Connor, who since 1902 was publishing and editing his T. P.’s Weekly,
wrote in 1913: “Undoubtedly Harmsworth originated the new journal-
ism,” which O’Connor defined as Harmsworth’s strict control over his
leader writers and subeditors (T. P’s Weekly, 710). Under his stern hand,
Harmsworth’s, or Northcliffe’s papers worked to execute the war as Harms-
worth saw fit—which in 1914 was focused on promoting further enlistment
for nothing more than blind patriotism, as if readers needed nothing
further.
BELGIUM, BOYLE O’REILLY, AND THE ‘CLEVEREST MAN

IN ENGLAND’
On September 1, one day after The Times called for more troops following
the Battle of Mons, 4,000 London men enlisted, and by the end of the first
week of September, nearly 25,000 men enlisted in London alone (Hallifax,
20–21). Northcliffe’s papers, and all popular London dailies, were pointing
the way, but, for Shaw, in the wrong direction as it was only patriotic
enlistment for King and Country. On September 3, the cabinet’s Propa-

ganda Minister, C. F. G. Masterman, called a meeting of literary men to
enlist their support in pressing for massive recruitment, particularly in
“neutral countries” (Weintraub, Journey, 37). Attending the meeting
were authors (and friends of Shaw’s) from J. M. Barrie to Arthur Conan
Doyle. Shaw did not attend. He did, on September 15, write to the long-
standing editor of the Manchester Guardian, C. P. Scott, and submitted a
letter to the paper. Shaw noted that the letter had first been “funked” by
Northcliffe’s Times. In trying to reach Scott, a Liberal Party supporter who
had been one of the more enlightened of British press editors for some time
by 1914, Shaw added diplomatically: “I believe that this war, properly
handled, can revive what is really valuable in Liberalism. It might even
lead to a Liberal victory at the next general election. . . . Voting for Liberals
and finding Junkers in office is probably as tiresome to you as to [myself]”
(Collected Letters, III, 249–250).14 Scott declined to publish, despite agree-
ing with Shaw: “But I suppose one’s duty now is to encourage and unite
people and not to exercise and divide. At least I am afraid it is so, and
therefore we at least ought not to publish the letter” (qtd. in Laurence,
“Notes,” Collected Letters, III, 250). Shaw did not share Scott’s conclusion.
In the days following Shaw’s letter to Scott, the London popular press
continued to plaster leaders and articles on German military atrocities
committed in Belgium, indeed referring to the German advance through
the country as “the rape of Belgium” (Freedman, 33). The Daily Mirror on
September 21 reported on the German annihilation of the city of Senlis,
“NOW ADDED TO THEIR ROLL OF SHAME” (1). On September 23, Shaw sup-
plied a letter to Belgium’s Charles Sarolea, of Edinburgh University and
editor of Everyman. Sarolea was fundraising to assist Belgium refugees
fleeing from German troops. Shaw’s letter was “intended” for inclusion in
a Belgian edition of Everyman, which published it (Laurence, “Notes,”
Collected Letters, III, 250). Shaw took the opportunity to launch further
criticism of Asquith and Grey’s leadership, as well as criticizing the British
press’ romanticizing of British soldiers as saviors and avengers of Belgium.
He wrote:
Belgium has broken that [German] rush for us at frightful odds, and has never
let slip a word of reproach for the delay in reinforcing her.15 In these terrible
first days the Belgians must have said often enough “Where are the English?”.
And when we congratulated ourselves so very comfortably on the fact that we
at last got our troops across the channel “without a single casualty,” the
WAR 169
Belgians must have been sorely tempted to remark quietly that things can
always be done without casualties by people who take their time about it. Yet
no word of that kind has reached us. . . .
I say these things lest you should suppose that nobody ever thought of
them in this country. But many of us have thought of them and been a good
deal troubled by them and ashamed of the utter want of tact, caused by
thoughtlessness and conceit, with which our press boasted of our champion-
ship of Belgium, and evidently considered that it had done everything that the
Belgians could expect when it had praised the bravery of your soldiers very
much as if all Belgians were four feet high and constitutionally timid.16 [The
September 21 Daily Mirror referred to Belgian soldiers in “terrier fashion”
(1).] Please do anything you can to make your countrymen understand that
our obligation to Belgium is fully realized by many English people who have
no means of making their feeling in the matter known, and that the delay in
coming to her aid was not the fault of the people, but of the diplomatists and
party politicians who wished to conceal their intention of going to war until
the actual outbreak of hostilities made retreat impossible. This is why we
always go to war without being prepared for war. Had the matter been in
the hands of the people, our expeditionary force would have reached Liege
before the Germans. (Collected Letters, III, 251)
Again Shaw delivered the jab against Grey’s non-democratic decision for
war, and for failing to state diplomatically, before war erupted beyond
Serbia, Britain’s allegiance to France and Russia if they were attacked by
Germany. By the end of September, enlistment was again high for British
forces, the famous image of Lord Kitchener, then Asquith’s secretary of war,
stating: “You Country Needs You,” appearing that month on the cover of
London Opinion (Hallifax, 21). The modern recruiting poster was born. By
October, the war had become literally entrenched into a catastrophic night-
mare, with British and allied enlistment falling sharply (Hallifax, 21).
When Shaw wrote to Charles Sarolea on September 23, he was back in
London for late rehearsals of Pygmalion—the company was taking the play
to New York and the touring company was taking it to the English prov-
inces. Shaw would return to Torquay by October 13. He was also still
working on what would become Common Sense About the War, and during
the last week of September Shaw was approached in London by an Amer-
ican journalist named Mary Boyle O’Reilly, a journalist representing an
American newspaper syndicate seeking his perspective on the conflict.
Stanley Weintraub identified O’Reilly as “an unknown newspaper
woman,” which was not exactly the reality.17
O’Reilly’s father had been John Boyle O’Reilly, a poet and Fenian
revolutionary who in exile settled in Boston, where for some years he edited
The Pilot newspaper, which largely catered to Irish immigrants.18 His
daughter Mary emerged in the late 1890s as an active journalist in the
cause of women’s rights, especially among working-class women, as well
as an advocate for poverty-stricken children.19 She had also worked for
prison reform, and enjoyed significant recognition in the United States
prior to the Great War. She wrote as a journalist for numerous syndicated
American papers. In 1913, she traveled to Russia where she filed articles,
not in the vein of W. T. Stead, but on the persecution of Jews by Tsar
Nicholas II’s brutal and autocratic regime, as well as to Ulster where she
reported on Ulster resistance to Irish Home Rule. Her exposé articles had
earned her a significant reputation, even outside of America by 1914. Being
an accomplished woman in her field may also have appealed to Shaw given
his recent efforts for Women’s Suffrage; and there was the well-known
reputation that her father continued to enjoy, even though he had died in
1890. Shaw most likely knew of John Boyle O’Reilly, as many Irish in
Ireland, Britain, and America did in the early twentieth century. If that
and Mary Boyle O’Reilly’s pre-war reputation was not enough to attract
Shaw’s attention, she was the only English-speaking journalist in Belgium
when German troops invaded in August 1914, and witnessed the burning of
Louvain (“Mary Boyle O’Reilly Papers, Biographical Note”). She at least
represented to Shaw a first-hand witness to the early stages of the war in
Belgium, and could relay the truth about conditions.
In a letter of October 2, 1914 to Stella Campbell’s new husband, George
Cornwallis-West (on his way to war), Shaw referred to meeting O’Reilly as
he related her insights on the situation in Belgium with regard to sensation-
alized claims of German army atrocities designed to whip up further war
hysteria:
I have spoken to Miss Boyle O’Reilly, who was present at the sack of Louvain
but returned intacta.20 She saw the nurses whose fingers and hands had been
cut off. They had grown new ones and were in prime condition. One had her
wrists burnt. She had fooled with a spirit lamp of explosive construction. Miss
O’Reilly also interviewed the outraged women. They had all heard of outrages
in the next village to theirs, but had not actually witnessed them, and were,
personally, virgins. (Collected Letters, III, 252)
WAR 171
Shaw recognized in O’Reilly a journalist who, like himself, was focused

on writing the truth to provoke intelligent and rational public consideration
for social betterment, rather than romantic and moralistic sensational shock
articles that played on the emotions. But it was also time for Shaw to
exercise a realization from the Titanic sinking, that being the international
exchange of press copy between London and American newspapers.
One of the papers that would receive and publish O’Reilly’s Shaw
interview was the New York Call, the second English speaking socialist
daily paper published in the U.S.A. To Shaw, who still sought to get his
war message through to the international working classes, the New York
Call was probably attractive as some of his comments (as in “The Peril of
Potsdam”) would have been relevant to the proletariat—but the O’Reilly
interview was published in other papers as well, either in part or in full.
Stanley Weintraub reports that the New York Times published a “fragment”
of the interview in mid-October (Journey, 42). The full interview was
published in the New York Call and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and
numerous other papers, on October 18.
The header for the page 1 run of O’Reilly’s Shaw interview in the
Pittsburgh paper read: “Cleverest Man in England Talks to Mary Boyle
O’Reilly—George Bernard Shaw Slashes Right and Left”—notably
O’Reilly was mentioned before Shaw. An “Editor’s Note” preceded the
interview: “George Bernard Shaw is the most brilliant literary man in
England today. . . . In securing the following Interview Miss O’Reilly has
succeeded where a score of American newspaper men failed. Imagine a
German at home, or a Frenchman or a Russian talking like the following
and escaping the firing squad” (1). Again, it was easier for the editor and
journalist of a popular paper to see, or sensationally propel, only the surface
controversy in Shaw’s journalistic words, rather than his concise and rational
arguments.
O’Reilly was different. She, a serious leftist-leaning journalist, opened her
interview with: “(Oct. 9) By mail: ‘The Cleverest Man in England is an
Irishman,’ said modest Lloyd George, and he left me to guess whom.21 I
asked an interview of George Bernard Shaw.” She then added, “he [Shaw]
revels in the serene security of an intellect trained to work with ease. There is
no welter of ideas. Phrases fall swift and sure, as sentences in Sophocles” (1).
These comments from O’Reilly pose an interesting evolution of reputation,
if not also Shaw’s style, when compared to the introductory notes T. P.
O’Connor provided in The Star on September 24, 1888 in introducing
Shaw’s “Blood Money to Whitechapel”: “[Shaw works with] the light
touch, the deadly playfulness, and the rapier thrusts of a cultivated man.
Mr. Shaw is as yet little known to the general world, but he is a power, as he
deserves to be” (1). Shaw was again on page 1 with his comments, but now
enjoyed an important international reputation as the “power” O’Connor
had foretold—and Shaw courageously used that reputation to deliver his
clear and rational thoughts on the hysterical war-fever gripping Britain, its
allies, future allies, and its enemies. On this world stage of American
syndicated papers, Shaw repeated some of his comments from his previously
published “The Madness of This War” and “The Peril of Potsdam,” but
with, at times, further clarity and sharpness—and continued to provided
copy for O’Reilly:22
England is NOT at war because Germany made an “infamous proposal” to

violate Belgian neutrality. . . . If it had suited us to accept that proposal we
could have found plenty of good reasons. The England that grabbed Ireland,
India and Egypt cannot delude the Germany of Wilhelm II. Our national trick
of sanctimonious indignation is simply hypocrisy. Let us therefore drop it.
We explain that war is insensate deviltry—that is, war made by Germans,
not war as England makes it. We prattle of British courage, and for weeks sit
around in a state of frightful funk, holding each other’s hands and exclaiming
“Be strong!” “Be brave!” “Business as usual!”. We cry out against the needless
slaughter of German troops. But the only reason we fight in open formation is
because we have not enough soldiers to send them into battle packed like
sardines.
Now Shaw took aim at the aristocrats and the wealthy capitalists who
were leading the war and determining the respective foreign policies of
Britain and Germany:
The junker caste of Germany is no better, no worse, than the junker caste of
England. Commanding troops is the only aristocratic profession. The German
people hate the military caste as do the English people—and for the same
reasons.23
. . . In both armies THE SOLDIERS SHOULD SHOOT THEIR OFFICERS AND GO
24
HOME. The agriculturist to his land and the townsman to his painting and
glazing! (1)
The idea of soldiers shooting their officers to seemingly overthrow their

aristocratic and capitalist masters who had brought war to Europe and now
WAR 173
commanded them in war, needed clarification by Shaw, which he would do

in November 1914.
Shaw also expanded on the notion of England relying on aristocrats, who
were mostly unfit for work, for many of their military officers in his war plays
O’Flaherty, V. C. (1915) and Augustus Does His Bit (1916). In the former,
the peasant character, now a decorated (Victoria Cross) British soldier,
Denis O’Flaherty asks, “Whats happened to Sir Peace [his landlord and
Army General], that I thought was a great general, and that I now see to be
no more fit to command an army than an old hen?” (273). The latter play,
in turn, features Lord Augustus Highcastle, a British army colonel removed
from his command at the front due to his grotesque incompetency. In the
play’s brief preface, Shaw states that one of the British government’s prob-
lems in fighting the war “was how to win the war with Augustus on their
backs, well-meaning, brave, patriotic, but obstructively fussy, self-
important, imbecile, and disastrous” (201). But for Mary Boyle O’Reilly’s
1914 interview, the internationalist Shaw proceeded next to consider the
ghastly similarities shared by Britain and Germany:
England and Germany are a couple of extremely quarrelsome dogs gripped in

a bitter determination to do a rival incurable mischief. Each has the same
pretensions to naval or military supremacy, the same instinct for empire, the
same creed of force and or arrogant hypocrisy. “Weltmacht oder Niedergang”
(“Empire or downfall”) says the Prussian part. “World Domination or Ruin”
says the English Jingo.
Each holds the other a great robber state. England today holds one-fifth of
the globe merely by priority or robbery. Britishers believe Germany a country
that wants restraining. With England destroyed, Germany would burst into
world dominion. Therefore England’s mission in the world is to destroy
Germany.
We must never forget that as an unpopular and ill-mannered nation our
existence depends on our being prepared to fight the entire human race.
Shaw discussed next the foreign policies that had led to war, again
revisiting previous comments:
The great secret of our foreign policy is that we have no foreign policy. From
time to time the secretary of foreign affairs announces in the house of
commons [sic] that we are trapped into some alliance which we had not the
faintest idea of making. The late King Edward cherished a liking for Biarritz,
France, and England has a French entente.
. . . The foreign policy of England, France and Germany consisted mostly

in threatening the peace of Europe. Painstaking analysis of the state of Europe
today resolves into the fact that Russia wants something and is reaching for
it. In ten years England will be fighting Russia.
Meantime the map of Europe goes into the rag mill. And all because our
foreign office is not controlled by the democracy instead of by aristocratic
foreign secretaries and their retinues of Nuts. They never tell the truth solely
because if they told the whole truth both the Labour Party and the Liberals
would have revolted and abandoned them to Ulster!
Sir Edward Grey never dared tell the people he was going to fight. In this, a
presumably democratic country, he first declared war and then went down to
the house of commons [sic] to tell them he had done it. He trusted to their
inbred desire to HAVE A GO AT THE KAISER.
Shaw then turned his comments to, as O’Reilly termed it, “war”: “WE
ALWAYS LEARN IN WAR THAT WE NEVER LEARN FROM WAR.” Then to “THE WAR
AND THE SOCIALISTS,” as Shaw repeated his comments on armament
manufacturing and how it had benefitted many during the previous ten
years. He then expanded his points:
Fleets and armies are today mere credits and debits in some trader’s ledger.
Capital, badly needed at home, is sent abroad after cheap labour. Financiers
use the control of our army and fleet which they obtain through their control
of parliament solely to guard unpatriotic investments. England alone of
European nations has a hired army. As a socialist I am strongly in favour of
compulsory conscription. There YOU CATCH THE CAPITALIST AND HIS SON, AND
HIS SON’S SON.
The real objection to military service, is that we are all afraid of being killed.
ALL ARMIES CONSIST MOSTLY OF COWARDS; that is what makes war so thrilling.
[Shades of Arms and the Man] It is no more possible to take cowardice into
account in the matter of an army than to take sea-sickness into account in the
matter of a navy. While we so waste and degrade human life that the residuum
of unemployment runs into millions, the less said about the horrors of making
a man a soldier the better. OUR INDUSTRIAL CHAOS MURDERS MORE SOULS IN A
YEAR OF POLITICAL PEACE THAN ANY MILITARY SYSTEM MURDERS MEN IN WAR.
Shaw next specifically addressed his potential American readers:
In this war of nations the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA plays the all-important
role. When the end comes, as come it must, if only through international
exhaustion, peace will not be brought about by three colonels sitting about a
WAR 175
drum. There must be a world conference at which the President of the United
States must take the chair.
When French investors have lost the eight billions they loaned Russia:
when the czar’s government is bankrupt: when English credit is desperately
shaken and German industries wrecked, the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA will
push forward unburdened. Americans will be the lenders tomorrow: FOR
EUROPE MUST BREED MEN FROM THE MEN OF THE LAST RESERVE. (1)
As Stanley Weintraub posits, Shaw borrowed from his work that he

would soon title Common Sense About the War in his interview with
O’Reilly. If the interview was a process to try out some of the larger
work’s ideas, which Shaw knew would eventually reach Britain—in addition
to directly reaching American readers—then it succeeded. In some ways,
the O’Reilly interview was meant to serve as a provocative precursor to the
larger work, where the fine points of many ideas expressed in the interview
would receive full discussion. But most importantly, the interview delivered
some of Shaw’s views to a wide market, which perhaps went hand-in-hand
with the more limited circulation of the New Statesmen, where Common
Sense About the War was going to appear in November—but then appeared
in November and December over three Sundays in the New York Times.
Shaw was informing British and American publics that it was time for
common sense, as simple as that sounds, with regard to the European war
that Shaw, and many others, had feared for three decades. Arguably,
instilling common sense had consistently been part of Shaw’s
non-reviewing journalism, which served his agenda of provoking rational
thinking and consideration—in this case—about the war. Arguably, the
intent was to impact the way the conflict was being pursued by Asquith’s
government.
‘A MONUMENTAL AFFAIR’
On October 13, 1914, Shaw wrote to his sister Lucy Carr Shaw, mention-
ing: “I am hard at work here at an article on the war: a monumental affair”
(Collected Letters, III, 256). Eight days later, Shaw wrote to the New
Statesman’s editor, Clifford Sharp, about preparations for this “monumen-
tal” work, which was to be published and included as a supplement in the
New Statesman. Shaw also revealed that he had contributed to a book of
support for Belgium, titled King Albert’s Book, being published by the
popular Daily Telegraph with contributors including leading English and

allied authors, artists, musicians, (one) suffragette, and statesmen:
I have written (at the personal urging of Hall Caine [the book’s editor]) a
fierce piece of rhetoric about Belgium for . . . “King Albert’s Book”; but as the
moral of it is that if we leave an inch of Belgian soil in German hands we are
beaten or else blackly dishonoured, it will not be unpopular, and, if it gets out
first, which I hope it will, will prevent people from beginning the Supplement
[on the War] under the hostile impression that I am a Back Down & Stop the
War person. (Collected Letters, III, 257)
King Albert’s Book was not due to be published until mid-December,

roughly one month after Shaw’s supplement appeared, but as a result of the
firestorm that greeted the New Statesman supplement, the Daily Telegraph
“demanded” that Shaw’s Belgium essay be returned and not published in a
book that included contributions from those such as G. K. Chesterton,
Bramwell Booth, Maurice Maeterlinck, T. P. O’Connor, Gilbert Murray,
Lord Northcliffe, and so on.25 Therefore, in November Shaw’s supplement
stood alone, and was immediately preceded by fall-out from his interview
with O’Reilly. American and London editors had quoted Shaw out of
context in an effort to inflame hysterical patriotic and anti-German pub-
lics—as in San Francisco’s Bulletin of November 2 that ran the header
“‘SHOOT YOUR OFFICERS AND GO HOME!’ SAYS SHAW” (Weintraub, Journey,
43). Shaw did publish an “Open Letter to the President of the United
States of America” in the November 7 edition of Nation, but only with a
qualifier added by editor H. W. Massingham: “His [Shaw’s] Irish mind puts
the case with an indifference to which we cannot pretend” (qtd. in
Weintraub, Journey, 51).26 Shaw, concerned that American President
Woodrow Wilson would make a formal declaration condemning British
interference with American merchant shipping, urged Wilson to call for
Germany, France, and England to withdraw from Belgium soil. It
represented, as well, a nudge for America to support the allies (Weintraub,
Journey, 51).
Shaw’s hope that his chapter in King Albert’s Book would appear before
the New Statesman supplement obviously reveals that he knew the “mon-
umental” article was going to be controversial. He may have even suspected
that the controversy could potentially undermine his theatrical career,
despite the recent and ongoing success of Pygmalion. It would have been
far easier for Shaw to have not written his supplement and merely remained
WAR 177
silent for the war’s duration, or contributed articles and letters, like the
intended work for the Belgium book, which could only be interpreted as
patriotic gestures, even tinged with the romantic. But Shaw did not choose
that direction; instead, he prepared and presented Common Sense About the
War. He did so knowing that the romantic war-fever madness tied up with
morality needed his objecting, questioning voice—and as Shaw states in the
first paragraph of his supplement, “I do not hold my tongue easily” (Com-
mon, 16).
On November 5, the day Britain and France declared war on Germany’s
new ally Turkey, Shaw had replied to friend and classics’ scholar Gilbert
Murray regarding an invitation from Murray and H. G. Wells to sign an
open letter to Russian authors expressing support from England. Shaw
wrote:
On the 14th my War Manifesto will appear. In it I explain my attitude towards

the Prussian Tsardom and the occasionally inspired idiots whom it hangs,
flogs, & sends to Siberia. I am curious to see how far Russian genius will be
extinguished by the prohibition of vodka [which had been prohibited in
Russia for the War’s duration] . . . I will not put my name to any document
that deals with Russia unless it expressly and emphatically damns the Tsardom
uphill, down dale, and all the way to hell. It is our business not to help this
abomination to hide itself under the mantle of Tolstoy. (Collected Letters, III,
260–261)
Four days later, Shaw alerted Bertrand Russell that his “War Supple-
ment” would appear in six days (Collected Letters, III, 261).
In their Introduction to the 2006 What Shaw Really Wrote about the
War, a reprinting of some of Shaw’s war journalism, J. L. Wiesenthal and
Daniel O’Leary assert that Shaw saw himself “as the voice of common sense
in the face of romantic, melodramatic nonsense” that the popular papers
and politicians fed the general public daily (12). In fact, Wiesenthal and
O’Leary suggest that
for Shaw war is closely related to the dramatic stage. And there is a striking
degree of continuity between Shaw’s attitudes as a critic in the 1890s and
during the war. In each case he is conducting his own battle against a childish,
melodramatic imagination that prevents people from seeing the realities of
life. (12)
This is suggested particularly by the English tendency during the war to see
Germany portrayed and viewed melodramatically as “a diabolical opponent,”
or rather seeing the war in melodramatic terms of hero and villain, being
Britain and Germany (13). In this vein, Wiesenthal and O’Leary argue that
Shaw’s war writing exhibited the style of the dramatic critic of the 1890s.
Certainly Shaw saw himself always as the critic of British society—in his art,
music, and theater criticism; in his plays, his lectures, and his journalism; in
fact in his entire professional and complete repertoire. His opponent within
this context was frequently, if not constantly, the melodramatic mindset that
first intellectually materialized for Shaw in the 1880s through the sensation-
alizing shock journalism of W. T. Stead, and the said journalism Stead
inspired. It was this journalism that, under the guise of morality, generated
and fueled the Whitechapel frenzy without forcing the comfortable classes to
address politically and economically the real issue at hand—rampant East
London poverty. The same journalism destroyed Parnell and Ireland’s last
chance for independence without violence for the sake of an archaic and
restrictive marriage law. The sensationalizing journalism also celebrated the
Titanic disaster as a melodrama while ignoring the incompetence and greed
that left so many to die in the icy North Atlantic. And it led millions of men
into the horrors of the Great War for the empty romantic patriotic promise of
King and Country, or for Belgium’s neutrality, while allied with the despotic
and murderous Tsar Nicholas II—all of which was brilliantly responded to by
Shaw. Shaw’s responses consistently presented the truth in order to provoke
reasonable and informed consideration—undermining the ignorance gener-
ated by sensationalizing journalism which put popularity before truth. For
Shaw, the war that now needed to be won had to be about creating a better
world that would be worth the lives lost in attaining victory, and not about
the lies politicians, generals, and sensationalizing journalists postulated. Quite
simply, the old had to give way to something new—and the country (coun-
tries) needed to awaken from their melodramatic orgy of ignorance. To this
end, Shaw borrowed from the title of his 1904 The Common Sense of Munic-
ipal Trading.
In red print, “WAR SUPPLEMENT BY G. BERNARD SHAW” appeared above the
New Statesman’s masthead on November 14, 1914. Playing on Shaw’s
reputation as a public intellectual, the New Statesman’s editor Clifford
Sharp tried to capitalize on the anticipation for Shaw’s “War Supplement,”
despite his reservations over the potential controversy the supplement could
provoke—that is, if common sense could provoke controversy.
WAR 179
STEAD, JOURNALISM, AND COMMON SENSE

Shaw opened Common Sense About the War by writing:
The time has come to pluck up courage and begin to talk and write soberly
about the war. At first the mere horror of it stunned the more thoughtful of
us; and even now only those who are not in actual contact with or bereaved
relation to its heartbreaking wreckage can think sanely about it, or endure to
hear others discuss it coolly. (16)
Shaw had learned to at least acknowledge the bereaved following Conan

Doyle’s earlier criticism of his remarks leveled at the Titanic’s Captain
Smith, which had not considered Smith’s family—especially given the
now greatly magnified numbers of those bereaved in Britain. By the time
Common Sense appeared in mid-November, the British Expeditionary Force
(BEF) was engaged in the First Battle of Ypres. The battle, in various
configurations, ran from October 14 to November 30, with total British
casualties numbering more than 58,000 soldiers (in addition to BEF casu-
alties from August which totaled nearly 90,000) (Simkins, Jukes, and
Hickey, 60–62). By this time, the popular British belief that the war
would be over by Christmas was shattered. Even C. P. Scott’s Manchester
Guardian reported in October on a recruitment speech by Lord Curzon,
who “admonished men for not enlisting” because they believed unrealisti-
cally that the war was going to be brief (Hallifax, 23). Shortly after Common
Sense appeared, Lord Kitchener also began foreseeing “a long and costly
war, [and] had begun a vast expansion of Britain’s military forces” (Simkins,
Jukes, and Hickey, 62). Britain was in a crisis mode, unlike any crisis
previously experienced.
Shaw noted in Common Sense:
. . . until Home Rule emerges from its present suspended animation, I shall
retain my Irish capacity for criticizing England with something of the detach-
ment of a foreigner, and perhaps with a certain slightly malicious taste for
taking the conceit out of her. Lord Kitchener made a mistake the other day in
rebuking the Irish volunteers for not rallying faster to the defense of “their
country.”27 They do not regard it as their country yet. He should have asked
them to come forward as usual and help poor old England through a stiff
fight. Then it would have been all right. (16–17)
Shaw then explained that his Irish prejudices “are not those which blind the
British patriot, and therefore I am fairly sure to see some things that have
not yet struck him” (17). Continuing, Shaw explained:
I see the people of England united in a fierce detestation and defiance of the
views and acts of Prussian Junkerism. And I see the German people stirred to
the depths by a similar antipathy to English Junkerism, and angered by the
apparent treachery and duplicity of the attack made on them by us in their
extremist peril from France and Russia. I see both nations duped, but alas!
Not quite unwillingly duped, by their Junkers and Militarists of England and
Germany jumping at the chance they have longed for in vain for many years of
smashing one another and establishing their own oligarchy as the dominant
military power in the world. (17)
In a few quick sentences, Shaw cut to the mentality behind the war for both
Germany and Britain, two countries he continued to see as extremely
similar. Shaw repeated a statement about what working-class soldiers should
do in different circumstances, or what some militant socialists had
thought—but now he explained:
No doubt the heroic remedy for this tragic misunderstanding is that both
armies should shoot their officers and go home to gather in their harvests in
the villages and make a revolution in the towns; and though this is not at
present a practicable solution, it must be frankly mentioned, because it or
something like it is always a possibility in a defeated conscript army if its
commanders push it beyond human endurance . . . . But there is no
chance—or as our Junkers would put it, no danger—of our soldiers yielding
to such an ecstasy of commonsense. (17)
Shaw suggested that Englishmen who had, and would, enlist did so volun-
tarily (at that point in the war): “they are not defeated nor likely to be” as
“their meals [are] reasonably punctual; they are as pugnacious as their
officers.” Then Shaw conceded: “in fighting Prussia they are fighting a
more deliberate, conscious, tyrannical, personally insolent, and dangerous
Militarism than their own” (17).
In blaming the War on the Junkers and militarists in both countries,
Shaw adamantly stated: “Sir Edward Grey is a Junker from his topmost hair
to the tips of his toes” (19). Shaw then moved onto the Militarists who
believed “that all real power is the power to kill, and that Providence is on
the side of big battalions” (19). Shaw then discussed the highly effective
WAR 181
propaganda that helped to establish and solidify the English militarist

position against Germany to the British public. He suggested that the
long-drawn-out propaganda not only shaped the British public, but possibly
Britain’s militarists and Junkers—or at least empowered their beliefs and
positions. Shaw argued that pitting Germany as England’s enemy started
with the popular 1871 novel The Battle of Dorking, which depicts a German
invasion of Britain. This had been picked up and furthered by W. T. Stead
and his like-minded romanticizing journalists and others who contributed
to and propagandized the militarist mindset. Shaw wrote:
The Battle of Dorking [sic] had enormous sale . . . . its moral was “To arms; or
the Germans will besiege London”. . . . The lead given by The Battle of
Dorking was taken up by articles in the daily press and magazines. Later on
came the Jingo fever . . . , Stead’s Truth About the Navy, Mr. Spenser
Wilkinson, the suppression of the Channel Tunnel, Mr. Robert Blatchford,
Mr. Gavin, Admiral Maxse, Mr. Newbolt, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, The National
Review, Lord Roberts, the Navy League, the imposition of an Imperialist
Foreign Secretary on the Liberal Cabinet, Mr. Wells’s War in the Air . . . , and
the Dreadnoughts. (20)
Shaw had remembered Stead’s “The Truth about the Navy” series of
articles in The Pall Mall Gazette from September to December 1884, dating
to the beginning of Stead’s and Shaw’s respective rises within journalism
and beyond. Stead’s Navy campaign, which pre-dated his “Maiden Tribute
to Modern Babylon” series, was the series that first gained Stead much
attention. Its insistence on greater government spending on Britain’s navy,
it should be recalled, rallied the British public to demand an increase in naval
spending out of fear of being attacked by other European countries. It was a
classic example of modern fear journalism. Stead’s navy series prodded
Britain into the European arms race at its beginning, with an increase in
Britain’s animosity toward its neighbors as a by-product, which Stead, either
consciously or not, attempted but failed to undo through decades of
disarmament and peace advocacy. To Shaw, Stead’s navy series was a
dangerous and lasting legacy of Stead’s melodramatic and sensationalizing
journalism. Shaw was still countering Stead’s presence and influence in
1914. Indeed, one might even say that Shaw, in 1914, was still countering
Stead’s Britain.
The other journalists and contributors to British militarist propaganda
listed by Shaw in Common Sense About the War include Spenser Wilkinson,
who advocated expanding the British military in the London Morning Post
and was a founding member of the Navy League; Robert Blatchford, whose
articles in Northcliffe’s The Daily Mail in 1909 warned of Germany’s intent
to invade England, and had dovetailed well with the Russian tsar’s visit to
Cowes during the same year (helping to propagandize acceptance of the
Anglo-Russian alliance); Admiral Maxse, editor of the National Review that
advocated a strong British military; Henry Newbolt, a poet who romanti-
cized British military exploits; Rudyard Kipling, imperialist author of The
White Man’s Burden (1899) who sensationally condemned German atroc-
ities in Belgium; H. G. Wells who wrote War in the Air (1907), with its
depiction of aerial warfare; and the militarist Navy League, which Shaw
criticized in 1898 in the Daily Chronicle for wildly celebrating the 1805
Battle of Trafalgar despite Britain’s then relations with France. It is very
telling that Shaw saw militarist propaganda in numerous examples of pop-
ular journalism that sought to connect its projected patriotism with the
British public to, in Stead’s fashion, lead the country. Of course, Shaw’s
efforts in countering this and other dangerous journalism since the
mid-1880s, was undertaken through his own journalism. Clearly Shaw
was well-versed in the journalism that had contributed to the Great War
and the manner in which it was being directed. After all, he had lived
through it with a critical perspective.
Next in Common Sense, Shaw reminded readers that he “steadily advo-
cated the formation of a formidable armament, and ridiculed the notion that
we, who are wasting hundreds of millions annually on idlers and wasters,
could not easily afford double, treble, quadruple our military and naval
expenditure” (21). Of course, Shaw, in shades of Major Barbara, saw
such armament spending as having provided steady work for thousands
before the war. Shaw also warned that the British public should not fully
embrace
the propaganda of Militarism and of inevitable war between England and

Germany as a Prussian infamy for which the Kaiser must be severely punished.
That is not fair, not true, not gentlemanly. We began it; and if they met us
half-way, as they certainly did, it is not for us to reproach them. (21)
These were inflammatory words indeed, as the government’s and popu-

lar press’ propaganda of avenging Belgium had been believed by most, as
had the claim that Germany alone had started the war, not Grey’s failure to
prevent it by immediately declaring Britain’s alliance with France.
WAR 183
Shaw ended his section on militarism and its propaganda by asserting:
In short, Militarism must be classed as one of the most inconsiderately foolish

of the bogus “sciences” which the last half century has produced in such
profusion. . . . The only rule of thumb that can be hazarded on the strengths of
actual practice is that wars to maintain or upset the Balance of Power between
States, called by inaccurate people Balance of Power wars, and by accurate
people Jealousy of Power wars, never established the desired peaceful and
secure equilibrium. (25)
Shaw’s inference being that if the war was treated as only a Balance of
Power conflict, it would not prevent future wars. The current war needed a
greater cause, and Shaw was moving toward proposing such a cause. But
next he moved into a discussion of “the diplomatic history of the present
case” (25).
Shaw again outlined, this time more minutely, how Grey and his office
led England and Europe into the war. Speaking directly to Grey, as if it was
still July, Shaw wrote:
There is just one chance of avoiding Armageddon: a slender one, but worth
trying. You averted war in the Algeciras crisis [between France and Germany
in early 1906 over Morocco], and again in the Agadir crisis [in 1911 between
the same countries over the same issue], by saying you would fight. Try it
again. The Kaiser is stiffnecked because he does not believe you are going to
fight this time. Well, convince him that you are. The odds against him will
then be so terrible that he may not dare to support the Austrian ultimatum to
Servia [Serbia] at such a price. (29)
Further, Shaw noted:
The Foreign Office, always acting through its amiable and popular but con-
fused instrument Sir Edward [Grey], unmasked the Junker-Militarist battery.
He suddenly announced that England must take a hand in the war, though he
did not yet tell the English people so, it being against the diplomatic tradition
to tell them anything until it is too late for them to object. (29–30)28
All of this, as Shaw revealed, “is recorded in the language of diplomacy in

the [Foreign Office’s] White Paper [publication record] on or between the
lines. That language is not so straightforward as my language; but at the
crucial points it is clear enough” (30). Shaw’s point was that the diplomatic
scenario pursued, or not pursued by Grey and the Foreign Office was
present for any to read and consider. It is the questioning of the process
that Shaw saw as paramount, and which he was endeavoring to provoke
within his readers. There could be no change in the status quo unless
knowledgeable questions were raised. Of course, Shaw’s scorn for the
government was not all for Grey, and no doubt carried with it his contempt
for the Liberal Party that dated at least back to the 1880s and the attacks
T. P. O’Connor edited out of his writings for The Star in early 1888:
. . . no British Government within my recollection has ever understood the

nation. Mr. Asquith [a former barrister], true to the Gladstonian tradition
(hardly just to Gladstone, by the way) that a Liberal Prime Minister should
know nothing concerning foreign policies and care less, and calmly insensible
to the real nature of the popular explosion, fell back on [the] 1839 [Treaty of
London to protect Belgium’s neutrality], picking up the obvious barrister’s
point about the violation of the neutrality of Belgium, and trying equally
obvious barrister’s claptrap about “an infamous proposal” on the jury. He
assured us that nobody could have done more for peace than Sir Edward Grey,
though the rush to smash the Kaiser was the most popular thing Sir Edward
had ever done. (33)
Shaw continued targeting Asquith by arguing that the prime minister was
trapped in focusing on the Belgium issue as the cause for Britain entering
the war. Shaw suggested that Asquith was unable to “talk of the Kaiser’s
imprisonments of editors and democratic agitators and so forth, [or] a
Homeric laughter [of] Votes [would erupt if he did], punctuated with
cries of ‘How about Denshawai?’ ‘What price Tom Mann?’ ‘Votes for
women!’ ‘Been in India lately?’” (33).29 All examples of Britain’s harsh
non-democratic responses to dissension.
Shaw most likely knew that his assaults on the government, particularly
Grey and Asquith, may have been too soon in that both were still riding a
popular wave in November 1914. However, as war casualties continued to
mount, that popular wave would soon disintegrate unless decisive victories
in the field could be achieved—and such victories were proving quite elusive
for any side. In the anticipation of criticism leveled at his comments, Shaw
added:
And now somebody who would rather I had not said all this (having probably
talked dreadful nonsense about Belgium and so forth for a month past) is sure
WAR 185
to ask “Why all this recrimination? What is done is done. Is it not now the duty
of every Englishman to sink all differences in the face of the common peril?”
Shaw’s response cut to his journalistic goal:
To all such prayers to be shielded from that terrible thing, the truth, I must
reply that history consists mainly of recrimination, and that I am writing
history because as accurate knowledge of what has occurred is not only
indispensable to any sort of reasonable behaviour on our part in the face of
Europe when the inevitable day of settlement comes, but because it has a
practical bearing on the most perilously urgent and immediate business before
us: the business of the appeal to the nation for recruits and for enormous sums
of money. (34–35)
Shaw argued that to make the above appeals to the British people, the
country needed to decide to do it on the grounds of “our love of freedom”
and for England’s tradition as the “guardian of the world’s liberty,” and not
“[falling] to bad law about an obsolete treaty and cant about the diabolical
personal disposition of the Kaiser, and the wounded propriety of a peace-
loving England, and all the rest of the slosh and tosh that has been making
John Bull sick for months past” (35). It was, Shaw asserted, “time to pull
ourselves together; to feel our muscle; to realize the value of our strength
and pluck; and to tell the truth unashamed like men of courage and
character, not to shirk it like the official apologists of a Foreign Office
plot” (35). Clearly Shaw’s position was not unpatriotic and was a sensible
and thinking position. It was also the only reasonable position to take. He
was not embracing the mindless patriotic nonsense of defending Belgium
while Britain occupied many colonies with standing armies. Nor was he
willing to accept whatever the government proclaimed through the press,
but rather called for a position of truth to fight the war as it then needed to
be fought—within the democratic tradition of questioning the government.
The lives of its soldiers demanded no less. The attacks against Shaw in the
wake of Common Sense’s publication, such as labeling him a traitor, were as
unthinking and as untruthful as the “slosh and toss” the government and
the popular sensationalizing press had been steadily feeding the British
public since the crisis began—and decades before.
Writing to Clifford Sharp on October 21 about Common Sense as he
worked on its completion, Shaw noted: “I think it brings out Socialism with
something like an intelligible and distinctive foreign policy at last” (Collected
Letters, III, 257). In Common Sense, after taking the Liberal government to
task, Shaw writes: “Socialism makes for peace because the interests it serves
are international. So, as the Socialist side is the democratic side, we had
better democratize our diplomacy if we desire peace” (44). For Shaw, the
reliance on aristocrats for diplomacy, or even a Foreign Office that functions
in a non-democratic direction, is disastrous for a country claiming to
embrace democratic policies:
Time is pressing, because it is not enough for the Allies to win: we and not
Russia must be the decisive factor in the victory, or Germany will not be fairly
beaten . . . . We must have the best army in Europe; and we will not get it under
existing arrangements. We are passing the first phase of the war fever, in which
men flock to the colours by instinct, by romantic desire for adventure . . . .
The difficulty begins when all the men susceptible to these inducements are
enlisted, and we have to draw on the solid, sceptical, sensible residuum who
know the value of their lives and services and liberties, and will not give them
except on substantial and honourable conditions. These Ironsides know that
is it one thing to fight for your country, and quite another to let your wife and
children starve to save our rich idlers from a rise in the supertax. . . . They have
not forgotten the . . . floggings in our military prisons, not the scandalous
imprisonment of Tom Mann, nor the warnings as to military law and barrack
life contained even in Robert Blatchford’s testimony that the army made a
man of him. (44–45)
As Shaw discussed the recruitment of the skeptical working class (while

alluding again to Blatchford’s pre-war militarizing Junker journalism), he
acknowledged the necessity of appealing to trade unions, even pulling them
into the recruitment process, “so there shall be accredited secretaries in the
field to act as a competent medium of communication between the men on
service and the political representatives of their class at the War Office” (45).
Shaw was for democratization of the entire war machine, which, of course,
was a sensible direction to take. Affording the working class representation
in the War Office was, Shaw believed, quite appropriate given that the
working classes were carrying most of the burden of fighting the war.
Shaw would, of course, be proven right that the military needed democra-
tization in that the British Army would suffer terribly through a litany of
incompetent aristocratic officers on numerous levels.
Next, Shaw raised the issue of terms of peace. He strongly advocated, as
he had in “The Peril of Potsdam,” for not crushing Germany further once
victory was assured and not to force humiliation and war debt on the
WAR 187
German people, although anti-German sentiment currently dictated just

that:
We had better not say to the Kaiser at the end of the war “Scoundrel: you can
never replace the [Belgium] Louvain library, nor the sculpture of Rheims; and
it follows logically that you shall empty your pockets into ours.” Much better
say: “God forgive us all!” If we cannot rise to this, and must soil our hands
with plunder, at least let us call it plunder, and not profane our language and
our souls by giving it fine names. (55)
He even warned Britain that if it must plunder, then refrain from calling it
“disablement.30 Cromwell tried it in Ireland. He had better tried Home
Rule. And what Cromwell could not do in Ireland we cannot do to
Germany” (57). This was a relevant Anglo-Irish example of conquering
followed by a punishing occupation, which no doubt served to remind the
British of what they were capable of and might do again.
Despite mentioning the possibility of revolution early on with his state-
ment of soldiers shooting their officers, but dismissing it as not “practica-
ble,” the deeper Shaw went into his text, the more he returned to socialism
for a restructuring of society. To Shaw, socialism was a cause worthy of the
great sacrifices being made in the trenches:
Will you now at last believe, O Stupid British, German, and French patriots
what the Socialists have been telling you for so many years: that your Union
Jacks and tricolors and Imperial Eagles . . . are only toys to keep you amused,
and that there are only two real flags in the world henceforth: the red flag of
Democratic Socialism and the black flag of Capitalism, the flag of God and the
flag of Mammon? . . . The plain fact is that if we leave our capital to be dealt
with according to the selfishness of the private man he will send it where wages
are low and workers enslaved and docile: that is, as many thousand miles as
possible from the Trade Unions and Trade Union rates and parliamentary
Labour Parties of civilization; and Germany, at his sordid behest, will plunge
the world into war for the sake of disgracing herself with a few rubber
plantations, poetically described by her orators and journalists as “a place in
the sun.” When you do what the Socialists tell you by keeping your capital
jealously under national control and reserving your shrapnel for the wasters
who not only shirk their share of the industrial service of their country, but
intend that their children and children’s children be idle wasters like them-
selves, you will find that not a farthing of our capital will go abroad as long as
there is a British slum to be cleared and rebuilt, or a hungry, ragged, and
ignorant British child to be fed, clothed, and educated. (66)
Shaw was moving toward the only possibility for achieving a lasting peace
as he saw it—a socialist democracy.
Shaw proposed that to achieve peace, a union of Britain, France, and
Germany needed to form a “Treaty of Peace . . . . This war has smoothed the
way to it” (66). He reasoned that France “does not dream that she could
fight Germany and England single-handed. And England could not fight
France and Germany without a sacrifice as ruinous as it would be senseless.
We therefore have the necessary primary conditions for a League of Peace
between the three countries.” Shaw was convinced that given the four
months of the war so far, the three countries would understand the
unfolding horrors and difficulties. Of course, such thinking required com-
mon sense, which, as Shaw knew, was very lacking in late 1914 among the
involved governments and popular journalists. Interestingly, Shaw asserted
that given “the fight by Belgium the other day, the small states will be able
to come in [to the League] with the certainty of being treated with consid-
erable respect” (66–67). This mindset may have influenced Shaw’s journal-
istic response in 1916 to the Easter Rising in Dublin.
The scope of Shaw’s Common Sense continued to expand as he consid-
ered, as a temporary resident in Torquay, the Belgian refugees flooding into
Britain, many among them arriving in the West Country. He was troubled
by the way that some refugees were treated and suggested that since
German prisoners of war seemed to be kept in better conditions, Belgians
fleeing to England should “pick up German uniforms on the battlefields and
surrender to the British” (69). Subtly, as a side angle, Shaw was exposing
the government’s fraudulent claim of avenging the invasion of Belgium
while it had no effective policy for addressing the country’s refugees who
had come to England. Shaw criticized British trade unions that protested at
any suggestion of employing refugees. Then Shaw spun the problem into
his socialist argument:
All this exasperating anomaly and deadlock and breakdown would disappear if
we had a proper system of provision for our own unemployed civilians. . . .
The problem was worked out by one of the hardest bits of thinking yet done
in the Socialist movement, and set forth in the Minority Report of the Royal
Commission on the Poor Law and the Relief of Distress, 1909. Our helpless-
ness in the present emergency shews how very unwise we were to shelve that
report. Unluckily, what with the wounded vanity of the majority of the
Commission, who had been played off the stage by Mrs. Sidney [Beatrice]
Webb. (69)
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Shaw then partially blamed “the folly of the younger journalists of the
advance guard, . . . [who] revolted with all the petulant anarchism of the
literary profession against the ideal Interfering Female as typified in their
heated imaginations by poor Mrs. Sidney Webb” (69–70). It was a nod to
Shaw’s friend and Fabian colleague Beatrice Webb, the force behind the
Minority Report. It was also a warning to Asquith’s government, as well as
to the governments of France, Germany, and Russia to address unemploy-
ment. Shaw elaborated:
. . . if the problem of unemployment among our own people becomes acute,

we shall have to fall back on the Minority Report proposals or else run the risk
of a revolt against the war. We have already counted on the chances of that
revolt hampering Germany, just as Germany counted on the chances of its
hampering Russia. The notion that the working classes can stop a war by a
general international strike is never mentioned during the first rally to the
national flag at the outbreak of a war; but it is there all the time, ready to break
out again if the supplies of food and glory run short. Its gravity lies in its
impracticability. If it were practicable, every sane man would advocate it. As it
is, it might easily mean that British troops would be coercing British strikers at
home when they should be fighting Potsdam abroad, thus producing a
disastrous and detestable division of popular feeling in the face of the
enemy. (70)
Shaw’s warning here, of course, proved prophetic with regard to Russia in

1917, as well as to Ireland in 1916 when, arguably, some of the anti-British
feeling in Dublin was intensified by the war. Dubliner James Connolly had
already called for an international working-class revolt against the war in
August. Since such a revolt was, as Shaw stipulated, not practicable,
Connolly adapted his revolt to limited action in Dublin and amalgamated
his Irish Citizen Army with militant Irish nationalists in 1916.
Returning to his League of Peace, Shaw warned that nothing would be
safe, as the promise of security was “the Militarists’ most seductive bait to
catch the coward’s vote” (72). Security was indeed how Stead’s 1884
“Truth about the Navy” succeeded as propaganda, as well as Blatchford’s
1909 Daily Mail articles that warned of Germany’s intention to invade
Britain, and many more journalistic endeavors that proved to serve the
militarist propaganda, directly or unwittingly.
Shaw also turned to the Church, criticizing religious leaders who strongly
supported the war mentality of killing and maiming, rather than offering
solicitude to soldiers and others in an effort to bring comfort:
We turned our Temples of Peace promptly into temples of war. . . . I venture

to affirm that the sense of scandal given by this is far deeper and more general
than the Church thinks, especially among the working classes, who are apt to
either take religion seriously or else to repudiate it and criticize it closely.
When a bishop at the first shot abandons the worship of Christ and rallies his
flock round the altar of Mars, he may be acting patriotically, necessarily,
manfully, rightly; but that does not justify him in pretending that there has
been no change, and that Christ is, in effect, Mars. (73)
Shaw’s criticism of church leaders culminated in his proposal that all

churches close until the war ended, which would serve as “a most powerful
reminder that though the glory of war is a famous and ancient glory, it is not
the final glory of God” (74). Shaw insinuated that church leaders had
become agents serving the Junkers and militarists, rather than serving the
people they were supposed to guide and comfort. Shaw’s socialist agenda
continued.
Shaw explained that the British Junkers used their power to maintain
their “position by the organized legal robbery of the poor; and to that end
they would join hands with the German Junkers as against the working class
in Germany and England.” Then Shaw asserted that the war benefitted
capitalists:
nothing would persuade the working class that those who sweat them ruth-
lessly in commercial enterprise are any more considerate in public affairs,
especially when there is any question of war, by which much money can be
made for rich people who deal in the things most wanted and most highly paid
for in war time: to wit, armaments and money . . . . the capitalist who has
shares in explosives and cannons and soldiers’ boots runs no risk and suffers no
hardship; whilst as to the investor pure and simple, all that happens to him is
that he finds the unearned income obtainable on Government security larger
than ever. Victory to the capitalists of Europe means that they can not only
impose on the enemy a huge indemnity, but lend him the money to pay it with
whilst the working class produce and pay both principal and interest. (77)
Shaw continued by tying his war commentary to his efforts for equality in
income, and placing the blame for Grey’s secretive diplomacy prior to the
outbreak of hostilities, on the capitalists:
As long as we have that state of things, we shall have wars and secret
mendacious diplomacy. And this is one of many overwhelming reasons for
WAR 191
building the State on equality of income, because without it equality of status

and general culture is impossible. Democracy without equality is a delusion
more dangerous than frank oligarchy and autocracy. And without Democracy
there is no hope of peace. (77–78)
To this end, Shaw insisted that Germany must be defeated, “not because
the Militarist hallucination and our irresolution forced Germany to make
this war, . . . [but] because she has made herself the exponent and champion
in the modern world of the doctrine that military force is the basis and
foundation of national greatness” (78). Democracy with equality, for Shaw,
needed to defeat militarism, and it needed to start with Germany’s defeat.
This was the thrust of Shaw’s socialist foreign policy, which he had hinted to
Clifford Sharp on October 21—if pursued it would provide a real cause for
the war. Embracing such a cause, in Shaw’s view, would mean that capitalist
war profiteering, aristocratic idlers whose only occupation was as military
commanders, and diplomats with no practical understanding of war or
diplomacy, would all become outmoded things of the past and be replaced
by democracy and equality. Shaw then moved to his final section, under the
subheading “RECAPITULATION.”
He listed and expanded upon seven points:
1. The war should be pushed vigorously, not with a final crushing of the
German army between the Anglo-French combination and the
Russian millions, but to the establishment of a decisive military supe-
riority by the Anglo-French combination alone.
2. We cannot smash or disable Germany, however completely we may
defeat her.
3. War as a school of character and nurse of virtue, must be formally shut
up and discharged by all the belligerents when this war is over.31
4. Neither England nor Germany must claim any moral superiority in
the negotiation. Both were engaged for years in a race for armaments.
Both indulged and still indulge in literary and oratorical provocation.
5. Militarism must not be treated as a disease peculiar to Prussia. It is
rampant in England; and in France . . . . If the upshot of the war is to
be regarded and acted upon simply as a defeat of German Militarism
by Anglo-French Militarism, then the war will not only have wrought
its own immediate evils of destruction and demoralization, but will
extinguish the last hope that we have risen above the “dragons of the
prime, that tare each other in their slime”.32
6. It had better be admitted on our side that as to the conduct of the war
there is no trustworthy evidence that the Germans have committed any
worse or other atrocities than those which are admitted to be inevitable
in war or accepted as part of the military usage by the Allies.33
7. To sum up, we must remember that if this war does not make an end
of war in the west, our allies of today may be our enemies of tomor-
row as they are of yesterday, and our enemies of today our allies of
tomorrow as they are of yesterday; so that if we aim merely at a fresh
balance of military power, we are likely as not to negotiate our own
destruction. (80–84)
As history would reveal in the 1930s and 1940s, the negotiated peace
following the Great War which the allies used to break up Germany’s
empire (along with the Ottoman empire with its own repercussions lasting
far beyond the 1940s34) and destroy the country economically (both of
which Shaw warned against), created the vacuum in Germany that led to
another world war with even greater horrors, and old allies (namely Italy)
become enemies in the second global conflict.
Throughout Common Sense About the War, Shaw wrote the truth, or
truths, about the foreign policy that led Britain and Europe into war, as well
as truths about all the influencing factors, propaganda journalism included,
that contributed to the creation of the war. He also described how the war
should be ended and how wars in the future could be prevented. He
explained that capitalism and unequal societies would only replicate condi-
tions for war in the future—there was too much profit to be made to think
differently. Shaw believed that in a world of equality profiteering could be
eradicated and, presumably, focus could shift to the horrors of war and how
they affected all of mankind. It was, of course, a simple concept—or rather it
was common sense.
Shaw’s journalistic response to the war situation in Common Sense was
not only all-encompassing; it was also meaningful, as opposed to the shallow
patriotic jingoistic journalism that romanticized the unromantic and pro-
moted worship of England’s leaders—at least during the war’s first six
months. Rather than critiquing Britain’s leaders, this style of journalism
contributed to the horror of the war. Common Sense was not only a mon-
umental work, it was worthy of Shaw’s journalism that had grown since the
1880s. In November 1914, it was the most important journalistic text on
the early months of the war. That his articles and commentary were lengthy,
as opposed to most journalism of the time, was testament to the subject
WAR 193
matter and what needed to be said. The policies that led to the outbreak of
war and the government’s execution of the fighting strategies were plainly
wrong, so a critical voice at the time was greatly required, or nothing would
improve. Common Sense About the War was and remains, a master work—
journalism at its finest when it was most needed and without a hint of
sensationalism or shock. Despite DORA and all the romanticizing patriot-
ism, Common Sense served as the model for how a democratic press should
function. On publication, it was poised to achieve the full potential, even
promise, of the New Journalism—and Common Sense remains today, in fact
is ageless, as a model of the questioning and criticizing that is not only
needed in a free press, but is the only and ultimate guarantee of a democratic
society. However, in November 1914, the popular press responded by
attacking Shaw and Common Sense, attempting to resist the power of his
most important words, and betraying the democratic values the country
should have been fighting for.
FALLOUT TO COMMON SENSE, AND IRELAND

Christa Zorn, in “Cosmopolitan Shaw and the Transformation of the Public
Sphere,” writes that “Common Sense About the War earned [Shaw] the
brand of traitor” (192). Zorn adds, “Intellectual opposition [during the
Great War] became vilified as radical, unpatriotic” (189). Shaw had been
devastatingly critical of the popular press for the part they played in prepar-
ing ground for the possibility of war. Now that same press was neither kind
nor opened-minded about Common Sense. While the attention it received in
newspapers effectively widened Common Sense’s public audience beyond
the readership of the New Statesman, it was a biased presentation of the
work. Rather than considering Shaw’s ideas, the popular war press went on
the attack. Rod Preece comments in Animal Sensibility and Inclusive Justice
in the Age of Shaw, that “Shaw was caricatured in the press wearing an Iron
Cross” (74). Northcliffe’s Daily Mirror, on November 18, attacked with an
editorial under the header “Spirit of Contradiction.” It claimed that Shaw
contradicted himself repeatedly, and indignantly asserted that Shaw “tells
us, at great length, that we are as much to blame for the war as Germany.”
The editorial concluded with, “Let us have the admirers of Mr. Shaw in
Berlin to rejoice. They can now revive his plays” (7).
The pro-labor Daily Citizen on November 23 also condemned Common
Sense and its author. This was a dramatic about face by the paper’s editor
Frank Dilnot, especially since Dilnot had published Shaw’s “The Madness
of This War” on August 1 and declared at the same time that Britain
“should not get involved in the ‘wretched international intrigue’ and should
avoid this ‘Diplomats’ war” (Griffiths, 166). Shaw must have been per-
plexed by Dilnot turning on him in this manner. He responded in the same
paper on November 26 by charging the paper with now being loyal “to the
Foreign Office [. . . with] its support of conscription under military law and
its abhorrence of Socialists and Labour agitators and its entire agreement
with the [popular] Daily Express and the Globe” (“Call You This Disci-
pline,” 162). Shaw elaborated:
Properly handled, this war can be led to a victory, not only for the Allies over
Germany, but for democracy over its worst enemies both at home and abroad.
When I say democracy I do not mean Mr. Asquith’s pseudo-democracy,
which uses Mutiny Acts in time of peace to imprison Labour leaders and
muzzle the Labour Press, but genuine working-class democracy. (161)
Shaw also asked the Daily Citizen’s readers if they “approved of my being
stabbed by their paper in the back when I am making a stand for them at a
crisis when such stands, never very easy to make, are exceptionally difficult
and even a little dangerous?” (163). Perhaps Dilnot, who had worked for
ten years at Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, was now conforming to Northcliffe’s
patriotic fever of autumn 1914, now being embraced by most London
popular dailies and which DORA was supposed to guarantee (Griffiths,
166). To Shaw, the stab in the back from the Daily Citizen reeked of Dilnot
selling out the pro-labor paper.
Shaw’s sense of the London press was revealed in a January 1913 debate
between Hilaire Belloc and Shaw. The former advocated the distribution of
wealth, while Shaw called for the abolition of private property. During the
debate, Shaw stated that historically “the press arose to protect the people.”
Then he asked, “What has become of the press? What has bought up the
press? Private property” (“Property or Slavery?”, 99). This testifies to
Shaw’s view that his journalistic battles were against capitalism and private
property, and as Dilnot and the Daily Citizen attacked his Common Sense in
November 1914, he undoubtedly believed Dilnot’s principles had been
bought. Shaw’s journalism, going back to 1888, fought the socialist war
for greater democracy. This was not lost on the small and non-popular
Welsh Labor paper Llais Llafur. On November 24 under the header “Shaw
and the War,” the paper printed:
WAR 195
In the form of a supplement to that admirable and influential journal, “The

New Statesmen,” he [Shaw] has published what will probably rank in history
as the most brilliant and pointed commentary by a contemporary author on
the causes and circumstances of the war. The Shavian lash is used very liberally,
and equally impartially. (1)
However, such press support was exceedingly rare in November 1914,

despite being a fair assessment, and most press responses were angry and
condemnatory. Dan Laurence and James Rambeau suggest that “the most
violent response to Common Sense About the War was from Robert
Blatchford’s leading article” in the Weekly Dispatch on November 22, titled
“Blatchford’s Reply to Pro-German Outburst” (166).
Blatchford had been included in Shaw’s list in Common Sense of journal-
ists who had propagated the militarist position, and therefore contributed to
the public’s acceptance of the government’s foreign policy and its war
leadership. Blatchford concluded his attack on Common Sense: “It is the
meanest act of treachery ever perpetrated by an alien enemy residing in
generous and long-suffering England” (qtd. in Laurence and Rambeau,
166). Shaw responded, in “Insensate Malice,” by reiterating his main
points. In addressing his position that the war needed to be fought for
real principals, such as for full democracy, rather than for hatred of Germans
inspired by shallow propaganda, Shaw wrote:
I think an Englishman who kills a German because he hates him is guilty of

murder. I think an Englishman who kills a German in self-defence or in
defence of his home and his folk is entitled to a verdict of Justifiable Homicide.
But the Englishman who kills a German, not hating him, for the sake of
principles which he believes to be as important to the German as to himself, or
to defeat principles which he believes to be as disastrous to the German as to
himself, is the only noble warrior; I believe I could get more and better
recruits out of any town in England on that gospel than on the gospel of
fear and hatred that Mr. Blatchford has let the Kaiser frighten him into. (169)
Shaw was now responding to many of the attacks against him and the
papers were printing his retorts, but not because editors believed his views
or wanted to allow him a fair hearing. The truth, right or wrong, was that
controversy sold newspapers and Shaw was headline news. As a conse-
quence theaters were now reluctant to stage his plays and some bookshops
declined to sell his books. However, Shaw remained committed to both his
war journalism and his simultaneous work on Redistribution of Income

lectures.
Shaw adapted his lectures into articles he provided for the New York
American newspaper that ran them on Sundays from mid-November 1914
to January 1915. In the paper’s November 15 issue (one day after Common
Sense About the War appeared in London and the day the first of its three
installments appeared in the New York Times) Shaw’s first article for the
paper, “Mr. Bernard Shaw’s Surprising Views About the War,” was
published. The article revisited, or replicated, Shaw’s arguments in Common
Sense on war and the equality of incomes. Shaw wrote:
It has been frequently asserted that the war is being waged to preserve what is
called “the balance of power” . . . I want to point out the rather curious thing
that the redistribution of income really lies at the bottom of the balance of
power. If income had been better distributed than it has, if it had been, say, for
the last twenty years better distributed in Germany, in France, in England, in
Russia, in Servia [Serbia], there would not be this bankruptcy of civilization
going on at the present time. (3)35
Again, Shaw argued that the balance of power was dominated by the
greed of ruling classes for more control. Shaw’s redistribution of income
philosophy would negate such class structure, or at least undermine greed
and dominance. His repeated call for equality of income was another
warning that the Western world stood on the brink of armed revolution if
the situation was not addressed. Two elements contributed to Shaw’s views
on this: the then recent labor conflicts in Dublin, the United States, and
throughout Europe; and the fact that at the time much of Europe’s working
classes were heavily armed and at war. Also, many still remembered Shaw’s
earlier comments that the working classes should shoot their commanding
officers and walk away from the war. Arguably, the world, a century on from
Shaw’s war journalism, is still reeling from the failure to redistribute income
more effectively and equally—globally and locally. But by late November
1914, a new development by the London press required Shaw’s attention.
Northcliffe’s Times was calling for the suppression of Dublin’s radical and
anti-British newspapers, as such papers opposed what they portrayed as
Britain’s, not Ireland’s war. Shaw, still monitoring a wide range of newspa-
pers, responded by writing a letter to Dublin’s popular Home Rule paper,
the Freeman’s Journal—revolution was stirring.
WAR 197
Shaw’s letter in Freeman’s Journal was published on November 30, two

weeks after Common Sense was published and amid the press attacks in
London. The Dublin paper printed the letter under the header “Ireland
and the War—the Erratic View of Mr. Bernard Shaw.” Shaw, ideologically
opposing the anti-war stance of the Dublin radical press, called on the Irish
to fight in the conflict with France: “If they will not join the French army as
volunteers, or the British army as regulars, they can, nonetheless, under-
stand that the one thing they must not do if they are good Irishmen is to
join the Germans or help the Germans against the French” (103).36 He also
addressed the Dublin anti-war editors: “You cannot consistently fill your
paper with the old injuries from England, and refuse to remember the old
championship, hospitality, and armed support we have received from
France” (101). Shaw was specifically referring to French assistance to Irish
revolutionaries during the 1790s. He then countered the English recruit-
ment tactic of calling on Irish Catholics to enlist in order to avenge Catholic
Belgium. Shaw wrote (perhaps contemplating his future Saint Joan): “The
holiest shrines and most glorious monuments of the Catholic Church are in
the charge of France, and make her cities places of pilgrimages. Is Catholic
Ireland going to exalt in seeing them battered with Prussian cannon?”
(102).
It was a poignant letter to his native city and testified, of course, to
Shaw’s commitment to a British victory in the war—rather than calling for
the Irish to fight for patriotic British reasons, they should fight on behalf of
France, remembering France’s historical assistance to Ireland, and for its
democratic values. However, Shaw also strongly opposed the London
Times’ call for the suppression of the Dublin radical press and warned the
British administration in Ireland not to take such action. Doing so, Shaw
argued, would drive “sedition underground, the only place where it can do
any real harm” (103). On this, Shaw was again quite astute. The Dublin
radical papers that found ways to re-emerge and survive after 1914, such as
the resurrected The Workers’ Republic edited by James Connolly, would
contribute to Dublin’s 1916 Easter Rising—which prompted further war
press letters from Shaw.37
A year after his Freeman’s Journal letter, Shaw wrote his war play
O’Flaherty, V.C. It was meant to serve three purposes had it been then
performed—encourage Irish enlistment in the British military; revive
Shaw’s temporarily stalled theatrical career; and provide Dublin’s
Abbey Theatre with a financial boost through the musical hall circuit with
the play. He also in fall 1915 provided Dublin Castle, seat of the British
administration in Ireland, with a pamphlet on how to recruit Irishmen for
the war.38 But during the first six months of 1915, Shaw the journalist was
beginning to see some changes within overall London journalism as the war
wallowed in its trenches.
By the early summer of 1915, Shaw had written a follow-up to Common
Sense About the War, titled More Common Sense About the War (Wiesenthal
and O’Leary, 85). Clifford Sharp at the New Statesman refused to publish it,
so Shaw published brief sections in various papers. But in the overall work,
Shaw expressed some satisfaction that a few London journalists were begin-
ning to question and criticize the government and the way it was directing
the war. He referred to the British munitions shortage during the early
months of 1915, specifically to Northcliffe’s Times that had criticized Lord
Kitchener, blaming him for the severe shortages. The result was that Kitch-
ener had been effectively “driven from power” by the controversy. The
paper briefly suffered a drop in readership given Kitchener’s long-standing
popularity, and the overall press’ favorable propaganda supporting Britain’s
war leaders since August 1, 1914. However, Northcliffe realized what his
papers had to do given the circumstances—to follow Shaw’s precedent.
Shaw noted: “The incident was a striking example of the power of a
democratic press in its legitimate use as the proper antidote to the official
secrecy with which Governments hide their misdeeds and shortcomings
from the public. . . . Therefore every journalist should have supported
Lord Northcliffe” for publishing the criticism (109).
Shaw continued in More Common Sense by stating that what was needed
during the war was “criticism, criticism, and still more criticism” from
journalists, confirming his belief that this represented the definition of a
free press within a free society (94). As the press slowly, very slowly, began
to diverge from its relentless patriotic praise—which was becoming more
difficult to maintain as the horrific casualties continued to build and poison
gas had been introduced to the killing trenches of the Western Front—
Shaw’s war journalism provided the precedent for press criticism. Common
Sense About the War and Shaw’s war journalism was being proven right, just
as his journalistic responses to Titanic, tsarist Russia, Parnell, Whitechapel,
and much more had been proven correct. To that end, Shaw continued to
submit letters to the press as the war continued, criticizing as needed.
Whether the popular editors admitted it or not, Shaw had achieved a success
in the gradualist Fabian tradition. The powerful Northcliffe, once a Com-
mon Sense detractor months before, now followed Shaw’s precedent.
Shaw’s war commentary continued to reiterate the precedent he set
when responding to a statement by a D. H. Charles that appeared in
WAR 199
Everyman, still edited by Belgium emigrant Charles Sarolea, in July 1915. It

was a letter written after the first disastrous British Gallipoli campaign that
had started in April 1915, which had clearly suffered from incompetent
command. Its horrific British casualties demanded questions from the press,
at the very least, especially as Britain was preparing to send further rein-
forcements against impregnable Turkish positions—and would do so in
August 1915 with similar results: little ground gained with catastrophic
losses. Despite the government’s leadership, contributor D. H. Charles
stated that it was wrong to criticize the government during the war. Shaw
responded in the same journal, under the header “The Need for Criticism,”
arguing:
. . . our governing class is so incorrigibly addicted to muddling, slacking, and

jobbing that even when their country’s peril makes them sincerely anxious to
do their best for her, they cannot change their habits or learn new methods at
a moment’s notice. The result is that if the English people stop the fiercest
criticism of their rulers on Monday, the soldiers will be in brown paper boots
on Tuesday; munitions will run short on Wednesday; and before Saturday ten
thousand men will lose their lives unnecessarily.
At the beginning of this war, I had not forgotten what happened in the
Crimean War until Florence Nightingale, [journalist John] Russell and
[Charles] Dickens attacked the Government as nobody had ever dreamt of
attacking the Russians. . . . I took the lesson to heart, and attacked the War
Office and the Government vigorously without waiting for support. But
instead of following me, our patriots took the easier and safer line of attacking
me. Months elapsed before my critical line was taken [by other journalists].
(177)
Given Gallipoli and the other military campaigns to July 1915, it was
absurd and irresponsible for anyone to publicly call for no genuine criticism
of the government.39 A few months later in an October letter to Bertrand
Russell, who had also publicly criticized the government in November 1914
in War, The Offspring of Fear—which was also vehemently attacked by the
popular press—Shaw wrote: “Our job is to make people serious about the
war. It is the monstrous triviality of the damned thing, and the vulgar
frivolity of what we imagine to be patriotism, that gets at my temper”
(Collected Letters, III, 315). Of course, the notion of people not being
serious about the war is reflected in Shaw’s Heartbreak House, completed
shortly after the conflict ended. But inflaming Shaw’s temper with regard to
the war continued into 1916, when developments at the front and closer to
home proved serious and devastating, and were made far worse by most of
the popular press.
The first emergency was the Easter Rising, the rebellion against British
rule that erupted in Dublin on April 24—one of its leaders was James
Connolly. While the rebellion focused on Irish independence, the timing
of the revolt was very consciously tied to the Great War and with the
dissatisfaction that it bred on the home fronts, especially in Dublin. Follow-
ing on the defeat of Irish labor during the 1913 Dublin Lockout, Dublin
was ripe for rebellion, and Connolly sought to take advantage of it by
merging his Irish Citizen Army with a faction of the Irish Volunteers
under the control of radical leaders such as Tom Clarke, Padraig Pearse,
Joseph Plunkett, Seán Mac Diarmada, and Thomas McDonagh. Just before
the uprising, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, a Dublin socialist, suffragette
journalist, and Shaw admirer, as well as a colleague of Connolly’s, contacted
Shaw, seeking his help in publishing in a London newspaper a letter he had
been unable to publish in Ireland. Sheehy-Skeffington’s letter included a
detailed statement purported to be an official memo from the British
administration in Ireland that detailed plans to arrest and disarm Irish
rebel leaders and “seize their quarters” (Shaw, “Neglected,” 122). Shaw
did not believe the statement and chose to hold on to the letter and
statement, rather than destroy them, which seemingly was his usual custom.
Two weeks later, the statement was leaked in Dublin, followed days later by
the Rising.40
The Rising lasted throughout Dublin for six days, with roughly 2,000
rebels being defeated by over 20,000 British soldiers with machine guns and
artillery. The rebels were armed only with rifles, some modern but most not,
and a scattering of handguns. All rebel outposts had surrendered by April
30. About half of Dublin was leveled and burned by the artillery barrage.
The Rising’s leaders, which included the severely wounded Connolly, were
tried for treason in a closed court martial where they were denied legal
counsel and were judged by high-ranking British army officers with no legal
experience. The secretive trials began on May 2 with no notification to the
press or public until well after the first death sentences were carried out by
firing squads. Not knowing about the trials and not knowing that the first
three executions had taken place on May 3 (followed by more on May 4 and
5), but knowing that there was the real danger of a swift and violent
response from the British military, which would be propagandized by the
London and Dublin popular papers, Shaw wrote to the New Statesman.
This time Clifford Sharp published Shaw’s letter, “Neglected Morals of the
WAR 201
Irish Rising,” on May 6. Presumably Sharp shared the concerns expressed in

the letter, or perhaps perceived value in publishing a response from Ireland’s
then leading public figure.
Shaw’s press letters concerning the Easter Rising have been discussed a
number of times from an Irish viewpoint, including by myself, but examin-
ing the letters within the context of Shaw’s war journalism may offer a
further insight to the power and depth of his writing. In his May 6 letter,
Shaw quickly drew on comparisons to Belgium, and sought to remind
British readers—and the British sensationalizing press—of their condemna-
tions of the German army in Belgium in August 1914 as they sought to
subdue the Belgian population:
Will Punch give us a cartoon of Mr. Connolly, in the pose of the King of the
Belgium, telling his conqueror that at least he has not lost his soul by his
desperate fight for the independence of his country against a foe ten times his
size? Probably not; and yet the parallel is curiously close in everything but the
scale of the devastation and the number of deaths. It may become still closer, if
the Government gives way to any clamour for frightfulness from the people
who were so shocked by it when [German General] von Bissing was its
exponent [in Belgium]. (120)
Shaw, who had been viewed as a traitor when Common Sense was published,
noted:
No wise man now uses the word Traitor. He who fights for the independence
of his country may be an ignorant and disastrous fool, but he is not a traitor
and will never be regarded as one by his fellow countryman. All the slain men
and women of the Sinn Fein Volunteers fought and died for their country as
sincerely as any soldier in Flanders has fought or died for his . . . . As a
Republican forlorn hope, their ideal cannot be insulted without insulting
our ally France and our friend America. (120–121)41
Shaw then moved on to lament that certain areas of Dublin had not been
more heavily destroyed during the Rising, specifically the sub-human slum
housing tenements in his native city—of which he was well aware. Of the
housing, Shaw noted: “Their death and disease rates have every year pro-
vided waste, destruction, crime, drink, and avoidable homicide on a scale
that makes the fusillades of the Sinn Feiners and the looting of their camp-
followers hardly worth turning the head to notice. (121)
Shaw next scolded the government, essentially, for suspending Home

Rule for the duration of the war after the bill had been passed in 1914.
Shaw’s reasoning was that under Home Rule, compulsory British military
service would have been in place, and therefore hindered the ability, and
perhaps some of the need, for the organization of armed revolutionaries.
Then Shaw again warned “that a rising may be induced in England and
Scotland at any moment by the same means” as in Dublin (121).
To this end, Shaw submitted Sheehy-Skeffington’s letter with his, along
with the statement of a plan to arrest rebel leaders in Dublin, which, if
published prior to the Rising, would have allowed the rebels to claim that
they were defending themselves (122).42 It was a tactic that Shaw saw as
easily replicated and potentially effective.
Shaw continued in his press letter, “If you wish men to be good citizens,
you must teach them to be good citizens,” and then attacked the roman-
ticizing and sensational British press, replicated by Dublin’s popular press,
for their role in contributing to the Rising—indicative of Shaw’s long
journalistic war with unthinking and sensation-mongering popular shock
journalists:
Has not the glorification of patriotism, or reckless defiance, of superior

numbers and resources, of readiness to kill and be killed for the old flag, of
implacable hatred of the enemy and the invader, of the sacred rights of small
nations as to self-government and freedom, been thundered at them for more
than a year by British writers who talk and feel as if England were still the
England of Alfred, and Socialism, the only alternative to Sinn Fein, were
sedition and blasphemy? (123)
It was a searing point against the popular press. Shaw continued:
Is it not a little unreasonable of us to clamour for the blood of men who have
simply taken us at our word and competed for our hero-worship with the
Belgians and the Serbians, who have also devoted their Sackville-streets
[Dublin’s main street destroyed in the fighting] to fire and slaughter in a
struggle at impossible odds with giant empires? (123)
As for dealing with the rebels, Shaw suggested that the British “bury” the
leaders, most likely not meaning bury after death but bury through an
imprisonment. As for the rank and file, he suggested that since they were
Republicans, “Why not make a present of them to Joffre [the French
commanding General] (123).43 On the same day, May 6, that Shaw’s letter
WAR 203
was published, The Illustrated London News named, in its report on the
Rising—which included many photos of Dublin’s destruction—James
Connolly as “the chief rebel leader, and a Syndicalist Labour Agitator”
(216). As the London press had named Connolly among the prominent
leaders, Shaw had to have taken note. Four days later, Shaw wrote again to
the London press, this time to The Daily News.
Shaw’s letter “The Easter Week Executions” started by responding
directly to a statement from The Daily News on the British military execu-
tions of 12 rebel leaders from the Rising, including some who were not
main leaders or organizers in any ideological sense. Connolly was not
among those publicly named as having been shot by May 10 (or May
9 when Shaw wrote his letter). Shaw began by almost echoing his charge
against the Foreign Office tradition in Common Sense, where nothing was
revealed to the public until after it was done—or nearly done. Shaw wrote:
You say that “so far as the leaders are concerned no voice has been raised in
this country against the infliction of the punishment which has so speedily
overtaken them.” As the Government shot the prisoners first and told the
public about it afterwards, there was no opportunity for effective protest. But
it must not be assumed that those who merely shrugged their shoulders when
it was useless to remonstrate accept for one moment the view that what
happened was the execution of a gang of criminals. My own view—which I
should not intrude on you had you not concluded that it does not exist—is
that the men who were shot in cold blood after their capture or surrender were
prisoners of war, and that it was, therefore entirely incorrect to slaughter
them. The relation of Ireland to Dublin Castle [where Britain’s administration
in Ireland was based] is in this respect precisely that of the Balkans States to
Turkey, of Belgium or the city of Lille to the Kaiser, and of the United States
to Great Britain . . . . an Irishman resorting to arms to achieve the indepen-
dence of his country is doing only what Englishmen will do if it be their
misfortune to be invaded and conquered by the Germans in the course of the
present war. (124)
Further into his letter, Shaw reminded readers that he was “not a Sinn
Feiner” and had worked to publicly and journalistically (in the New York
Times days prior to the Rising) discredit their nationalist movement, and
that he had called for Ireland to fight in the present war on the side with
France. But he added: “I am an Irishman, and am bound to contradict any
implication that I can regard as a traitor any Irishman taken in a fight for
Irish independence against the British Government, which was a fair fight in
everything except the enormous odds my countrymen had to face” (125).

Shaw also criticized Asquith’s government for making scapegoats, for
allowing the Rising to materialize, of their top administrators in Ireland,
Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell and Under-Secretary Matthew Nathan.
He cited the government’s failure to disarm Ulster Unionists resisting
Home Rule—once one group was armed, it was impossible to disarm others
(125–126).
When he wrote his “Easter Week Executions” letter, Shaw was arguably
cognizant of Connolly still being alive and his letter, criticizing the govern-
ment for killing prisoners of war whom they incorrectly treated as war
traitors, may have had as a secondary or even primary intent that of saving
Connolly’s life. Shaw’s press letter could possibly have gained public sup-
port to alter the government’s track, as in Stead’s tradition and his own. In
London, some public opinion against the executions did indeed surface
after Shaw’s letters were published, which led to Asquith trying to suspend
further executions. But the press that sought Connolly’s execution was
intent on stating its case too. On May 10, the day Shaw’s “Easter Week
Executions” letter was published, Dublin’s Irish Independent—owned by
Dublin capitalist William Martin Murphy who had clashed with Connolly
and the labor movement during the 1913 Dublin Lockout—stated: “Let
the worst of the ringleaders be singled out and dealt with” (qtd. in Yeates,
574). The paper also ran a photograph of Connolly with the caption: “Still
lies in Dublin Castle, slowly recovering from his wound” (qtd. in Connell,
5). Connolly had suffered a severe leg wound during the Rising and had
been operated on in Dublin Castle’s wartime military hospital.
The British Commanding General in Dublin, John Maxwell, resisted
Asquith’s attempt to suspend further executions, viewing Connolly as
“very poisonous” and “the worst of the lot” (qtd. by Foy and Barton,
190). Perhaps this was further evidence of Asquith’s failings. Connolly
was executed on May 12 while seated in a chair, with Asquith arriving in
Dublin the same day, hours after the execution. In 1917, while endeavoring
to have his name added to the Irish Convention to assist in determining
Ireland’s political future, Shaw wrote that he should get “a hearing,” based
on his two Easter Rising press letters, from the Irish “extremists because I
defied the lightning over the Maxwell terror” (Collected Letters, III, 482).44
In the second emergency, two months after the Dublin executions,
British casualties reached 57,000 on the first day of the Battle of the
Somme. By the time the four-month engagement ended, combined casu-
alties were close to 1.5 million with British military strategy remaining
WAR 205
largely unchanged throughout. In December 1916, Shaw was approached

by James Douglas, then editor of The Star and yet another journalist who
had apprenticed with the paper during the Whitechapel murders in 1888.
Douglas invited Shaw to contribute anything he wished to retract from his
war journalism to date. Shaw responded with a letter to the paper, “I HAVE
NOTHING TO WITHDRAW”:
I am not qualified to contribute to your series of confessions by people who

talked nonsense about the war when it began. If the series is to be complete,
you will have to enlarge the paper very considerably. I made a carefully
considered statement on the European situation about fourteen months
before the war, again seven months before. Three months after I made a
further statement, equally carefully considered. And I have made several
statements since then. Everything that has occurred has confirmed even my
conjectures with a precision that has startled me. I have nothing to withdraw,
and no changes of opinion to record.
As I was violently abused for my utterances during our Reign of Terror, I
suggest that you should invite contributions from the writers who frantically
attacked my Common Sense About the War [sic]. They will have plenty to
confess, and are doubtless anxious to apologise. (207)
In light of the Somme’s dead, Shaw’s war journalism remained the conveyer
of truth and well served Shaw’s role, as he had explained to Bertrand
Russell, of endeavoring to “make people serious about the war” (Collected
Letters, III, 315). Quite simply, the Great War was too ghastly not to take
seriously, and it had to be debated—which Shaw the journalist helped to
make possible.
Shaw’s published Great War journalism had been accurate and
represented the finest war journalism—perhaps the finest journalism—ever
recorded. As Shaw indicated in Common Sense About the War, he was
writing history: a history that has proven him a dedicated and courageous
journalist of truth. Shaw the journalist had sought to instill reason and
rational thinking within a public riled up by sensationalizing, romanticizing,
and moralizing shock journalism that obscured the truth with everything
from fantastic lies to misleading half-truths. For Shaw, the goal was not to
sell newspapers, but to provoke real social thinking. But above all, Shaw’s
important journalism sought to not only provoke debate, but to also
provoke an altered course. As for the Great War, many of the journalists
who had openly attacked Shaw’s early war journalism—such as
Northcliffe—came to embrace Shaw’s precedent of questioning and
criticizing, which eventually led to governmental change. One might sug-

gest that Shaw in 1914, along with a scattered few like Bertrand Russell,
saved democratic journalism, the potential of the New Journalism that
W. T. Stead’s early successes had promised. In turn, that journalism pro-
pelled modernization and all that followed.
NOTES
1. See Chapter 3 for Shaw’s satirical use of Tennyson’s “Ode to Wel-
lington” in his May 14, 1912 Titanic press letter.
2. While Grey was negotiating an agreement with Russia in 1906 (the
Anglo-Russian Convention which was signed in 1907), there were
efforts in Britain to promote better relations between England and
Germany. One such effort sponsored a banquet at London’s Savoy
Hotel in 1906 featuring various artists and writers working in both
England and Germany. Among the speakers was Shaw (MacMillan
210; 298). The reaction of the German press to the Anglo-Russian
Convention, which was publicly supported by France, was the
alarming belief that Germany was being “encircled” (MacMillan,
210). Years later, Grey recalled of the signed 1907 agreement with
Russia: “The gain to us was great” (qtd. in MacMillan, 211). He did
not see any difficulties with an alliance between parliamentarian
England and autocratic Russia.
3. One of Shaw’s concerns regarding France and England’s alliance
with Russia was that both countries would, in the course of the war,
possibly strengthen “Russia in western Europe,” as Shaw stated in a
private letter to Hugo Vallentin on August 6, 1914 (Collected Let-
ters, III, 244).
4. In one of Shaw’s two Great War plays written during the conflict,
O’Flaherty V.C. (1915), the peasant-class British army Private
Dennis O’Flaherty reacts to General Madigan, his commander and
landlord, when the General suggests that the war is for King and
Country, saying “it’s our own country.” The Irish O’Flaherty states:
“Well, sir, to you that have an estate in it, it would feel like your
country. But the devil a perch of it ever I owned” (259).
5. Shaw was not alone among socialists, especially Irish socialists, in
August 1914 who criticized Britain’s allegiance with tsarist Russia.
Irish militant socialist James Connolly quickly attacked Britain for
being allied with Russia in his “Our Duty in the Crisis,” writing:
WAR 207
“Now, as I, amongst other Irish Socialists, predicted all along, when

the exigencies of diplomacy makes it suitable, the Russian bear and
the English lion are hunting together” (4). Connolly, like Shaw,
opposed the autocratic Russian Tsar Nicholas II.
6. Potsdam was the location of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s primary residence.
7. The Denshawai incident involved British Army officers stationed in
Egypt who hunted pigeons connected to the villagers of Denshawai.
Following a confrontation with Egyptians, one British officer died.
The British arrested, tried, and carried out excessive punishments
that ranged from floggings to executions. Shaw wrote significantly of
the incident, as an example of Grey’s imperialistic foreign policy, in
his 1912 preface to John Bull’s Other Island—an edition of the play
printed in an affordable paperback version to sell for sixpence to
coincide with the latest Home Rule Bill. Shaw wanted the new
edition to be particularly accessible to all potential readers in relation
to Home Rule. In retrospect, the expanded Denshawai discussion
also served as an indictment of Grey’s imperial foreign policy as war
approached.
8. The Balance of Power view of the war, and a suspicion of Belgium’s
neutrality as the motivation for war by Asquith’s government, was
shared by other socialists at the time, including James Connolly in
Dublin. Connolly wrote in The Irish Worker in late August 1914
under the title “The War Upon the German Nation”: “the cry of
‘Belgium’ was a mere subterfuge. . . . The British capitalist class have
planned this colossal crime in order to ensure its uninterrupted
domination of the commerce of the world” (247–248).
9. Shaw’s continued concern with Russia as Britain’s and France’s ally,
particularly with regard to the danger Russia posed to Western
Europe, was due to Shaw’s abhorrence of the despotic rule of Tsar
Nicholas II with its significant and long-standing brutality toward
those subjects deemed as political activists. This was at odds with
Stead’s decades-long admiration for Nicholas. However, Shaw’s
sense of the physical danger that Russia represented to Western
Europe was, unbeknownst to Shaw and many Europeans,
overstated. Russia had still not, by 1914, recovered from its humil-
iating defeat to Japan in 1905. As a consequence, Russia’s position in
1914 was decidedly weak and not a match for the industrial milita-
rism of any of the then European powers. Revolutions in 1917
would remove the tsar from power, eventually leading to a Bolshevik
government.
10. There were some radical socialists who did eventually support the
war effort in Britain, as in other countries, such as syndicalist labor
leader Tom Mann. Mann supported Britain’s war and encouraged
working-class enlistment. James Connolly, who before the war saw
Mann as “the greatest of internationalists,” condemned him after
learning of Mann’s pro-war position, seeing him then as “a raving
jingo, howling for the blood of every rival of the British capitalist
class” (qtd. in Nevin, Connolly, 625). Curiously, Connolly did not
openly criticize Shaw for supporting the war. See the author’s Shaw,
Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation for a discussion on the
differences, and similarities, in Shaw’s and Connolly’s respective
Great War responses.
11. http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a¼d&
d¼NZTR19141107.2.18.
12. There were minor skirmishes between the British Expeditionary
Force and German forces on August 22, 1914, but the main Battle
of Mons, the first major engagement for British forces in the war,
was on the 23rd.
13. Shaw’s thinking on August 25, 1914 of submitting another letter to
the Daily News and Leader was presumably to criticize Asquith’s
cabinet.
14. As editor of the Manchester Guardian, C. P. Scott had been one of
Britain’s more enlightened journalists. In 1905 he famously hired
John Millington Synge to write a series of articles on Ireland’s
Congested Districts, areas of severe poverty in Counties Galway
and Mayo. Jack B. Yeats was hired to provide line illustrations for
Synge’s articles.
15. Belgium’s army was woefully outnumbered by the enormous Ger-
man invading force set on overrunning France from the north,
through Belgium.
16. The perception expressed by the London press of Belgians being in
need of British help, particularly with regard to the impression that
Belgium soldiers were short and “constitutionally timid,” became
widely believed in Britain. The soon-to-be mystery writer Agatha
Christie was also in Torquay when the war began, being a young
resident of the town, and was soon working in a military hospital
that also assisted Belgian refugees. She first conceived of her famous
WAR 209
fictional detective Hercule Poirot during this time. Poirot was a

Belgian refugee; he was short and physically timid. His very first
appearance is described: “He was hardly more than five feet four
inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly
the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little to one side. His
moustache was very stiff and military” (22). His physique did not
suggest military prowess, despite his moustache. However, Poirot’s
mind and psychological approach to crime is indeed powerful. Phys-
ically, he fit the English stereotypical perception of Belgians. Poirot
had been a police officer, but he fled the country to escape from
invading Germans. Christie’s Poirot can solve crimes that remain
complete mysteries to Britain’s police detectives, and arguably—and
perhaps subtly—refuted British wartime perceptions of Belgians. As
Poirot stories were published long after the war, his abilities gradu-
ally countered general British prejudice against those perceived as
“foreign.”
17. In Weintraub’s later book, Shaw’s People: Victoria to Churchill, he
referred to Mary Boyle O’Reilly as “a determined Irish-American
lady journalist” (219).
18. Following John Boyle O’Reilly’s death in 1890, The Pilot eventually
became affiliated with the Catholic Church, especially during most
of the twentieth century.
19. Mary Boyle O’Reilly’s efforts on behalf of poor children within
institutional housing, or confinement, was consistent with the
same concern expressed by Shaw, as in his 1910 “Poor Law and
Destitution in Ireland” lecture delivered in Dublin, See “On Irish
Destitution”, Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, 33.
20. Shaw’s phrasing, “I have spoken with Miss Boyle O’Reilly” suggests
that Cornwallis-West would be familiar with her reputation, or if
not, should be. If she was unknown in London, Shaw might have
written, “I have spoken to a Miss . . . ”
21. The inference from the quotation from David Lloyd George is that
Mary Boyle O’Reilly had a reputation for reaching members of the
British cabinet in September 1914, especially those cabinet members
who would have been thinking of attracting the United States as an
ally. Also, Lloyd George’s comment on Shaw as the “cleverest man
in England” prompts one to contemplate how Lloyd George
reacted to Shaw’s “The Perils of Potsdam” letter published in the

Daily News and Leader.
22. Dan Laurence suggests that Shaw “partially drafted and revised” his
comments in Mary Boyle O’Reilly’s interview (“Notes,” Collected
Letters, III, 252). Ed Mulhall, in his essay “‘Common Sense’ and the
War: George Bernard Shaw in 1914” on the website Century Ire-
land, outlines Shaw’s interview with Mary Boyle O’Reilly and the
historical movement into Common Sense About the War (http://
www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/common-sense-and-
the-war-george-bernard-shaw-in-1914).
23. In his second war play written during the Great War, Augustus Does
His Bit (1916), Shaw takes satirical and farcical aim at Britain’s
aristocrats who served in the military as commanding officers, and
who controlled the War Office. The central character, Lord August-
us Highcastle, a British army colonel, has been deposited in the town
of Piffington as a recruiting officer after a disastrous turn at the front
in his former field command. On realizing that his one staff member
in Piffington has been taken into the army, Augustus states “wrath-
fully”: “Good God! They will be taking our hunt servants next”
(220).
24. The capitalized headline appears in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette.
25. See Weintraub’s Journey to Heartbreak for further discussion of the
objection and rejection of Shaw’s Belgium article for King Albert’s
Book, pp. 47–48.
26. Massingham’s comment that Shaw’s Irish background gave him “an
indifference” to the war from the English perspective was a point
Shaw would himself make in Common Sense About the War.
27. In referring to “Irish volunteers,” Shaw most likely meant volunteers
in Ireland. But if he meant the nationalist organization Volunteers, a
note is needed. The Irish Volunteers or National Volunteers were
first organized in November 1913 as a predominantly Catholic Irish
response to the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force in Ulster, a
militia committed to resisting Irish Home Rule. As Ulster Volun-
teers smuggled arms into Ulster, the National Volunteers did the
same in Dublin and Wicklow Counties—both in 1914 prior to the
start of the Great War. Once war was underway, John Redmond,
leader of the Irish Party, called on National Volunteers to enlist in
the British military. Redmond argued that it was the Volunteers’
duty to Britain for the recent passing of the Home Rule Bill—which
WAR 211
was immediately suspended for the war’s duration. Redmond’s call

for British enlistment precipitated a split in the National Volunteers,
with a smaller but decidedly nationalistic section adopting the name
of Irish Volunteers. This smaller force resisted British enlistment and
its leadership eventually would propel some of its followers, in
conjunction with the socialist Irish Citizen Army, into the 1916
Easter Rising in Dublin against British rule.
28. The White Paper was a published record of the Foreign Office, in
this case referring to the diplomacy leading up to the war.
29. In December 1914, one month after Common Sense About the War
was published, Asquith’s government suppressed and closed radical
Dublin newspapers that rejected Britain’s war and promoted anti-
enlistment in the British military propaganda. Free speech under
Asquith’s government during the war was not much better than
the same within Germany.
30. Shaw’s comment on calling plunder “plunder” if pursued after war’s
end, anticipates George Orwell’s important post-World War II
essay, “Politics and the English Language,” in which he expressed
concern over government’s misuse of language in order to conceal
their actual brutality.
31. One of the focuses of Greg Winston’s Joyce and Militarism is Joyce’s
onslaught in his fiction against the militarist mindset as promoted in
schools in Ireland and Europe on all levels, even within parochial
schools. One particular area was organized school sports, which
promoted teamwork in a militaristic fashion.
32. Shaw borrowed this line from canto 56 of “In Memoriam” by Alfred
Lord Tennyson.
33. This view would become more debatable in May 1915 when a
German U-boat sank the Cunard Lines’ Lusitania off the coast of
Ireland with the loss of 1,119 lives. However, Germany maintained
that the ship was transporting arms to England, in addition to
passengers. Interestingly, in his Preface to Heartbreak House, Shaw
recalled: “To me, with my mind full of the hideous cost of Neuve
Chapelle, Ypres, and the Gallipoli landing, the fuss about the Lusi-
tania [sic] seemed almost a heartless impertinence, though I was well
acquainted personally with [ . . . ] and understood better perhaps
than most people, the misfortune of the death of [Hugh] Lane”
(34). Lane was the nephew of Shaw’s friend Lady Gregory, and had
been a leading art dealer and director of the National Gallery of
Ireland. In contrast to the smaller Lusitania, Titanic ruptured rivets

in its steel plating on impact with the iceberg, and took two hours to
sink. The German torpedo tore open a significant section of
Lusitania’s hull to the point that the ship sank and disappeared
within eighteen minutes. Since the ship was traveling from
New York, its sinking moved the United States closer to war.
34. In September 1916, the British and French secretly negotiated and
signed the Sykes Picot Agreement. It was a plan to partition the
Ottoman Empire after the war, assuming they would be victorious.
Secret diplomacy was still being pursued, and this time with little or
no thought to the independence of Middle Eastern territories
(Simkus, Jukes, and Hickey, 21). The cost of this agreement has
been high, and is still being paid.
35. Special and particular thanks to Peter Gahan for providing a copy of
Shaw’s New York American article “Mr. Bernard Shaw’s Surprising
Views About the War.”
36. Dan Laurence and David Greene published Shaw’s “Ireland and the
War—the Erratic View of Mr. Bernard Shaw” in The Matter with
Ireland under the title “Ireland and the First World War.”
37. The Workers’ Republic was revived in 1915 by Connolly after The
Irish Worker, which he was editing in November 1914, was
suspended by British authorities in late 1914. The first series of the
Irish Republic, also edited by Connolly, ceased publishing in 1903.
See Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation for more on
Shaw’s November 30, 1914 letter to Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal, in
its Irish context, and the related correspondence between Shaw and
friend Mabel Fitzgerald on the Dublin radical press and Ireland’s
role in the war.
38. Shaw’s career as a playwright stalled during the war since theaters
refused to stage his plays immediately after Common Sense about the
War was published. Shaw’s and the Abbey Theatre’s plans for
O’Flaherty, V.C. included music hall bookings for their production,
after its Dublin premier, in London and the British music hall circuit.
Had the production moved forward in November 1915, the music
hall appearances would have helped the Abbey Theatre’s finances
during the war and helped Shaw to regain his theater reputation—as
well as assist with recruiting the Irish in Britain’s industrial cities.
39. Even after Germany executed English nurse Edith Cavell for
assisting British and allied soldiers to escape German occupied
WAR 213
Belgium in October 1915, and the London press sensationalized

Cavell as an English hero, Shaw tempered the patriotic press: “We . .
. can enfranchise her sex in recognition of her proof of its valour . . . .
If this proposal is received in silence, I shall know that Edith Cavell’s
sacrifice has been rejected by her country” (qtd. in Holroyd, “Body
Politic,” 24–25).
40. See Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation for more on
Sheehy-Skeffington’s letter and “secret” statement he sent to Shaw.
41. The popular press made much of the rebel involvement of Countess
Constance Markievicz; born to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, she
turned away from such privilege for Irish socialist and republican
causes. On May 6, the Illustrated London News published a photo-
graph of Markievicz in captivity (216), the same day as Shaw’s first
Easter Rising press letter appeared. London papers also noted that
there were numerous women in the rebel ranks.
42. In Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, Charles Townshend argues that
the statement, a copy of which Sheehy-Skeffington sent to Shaw,
was based on a genuine British plan, but was most likely “sexed up”
by Irish rebel leaders (133).
43. Historically many Irish rebels emigrated from Ireland to France
following failed rebellions, as in 1601 and 1798.
44. Also connected to the 1916 Rising, and during the summer of 1916,
Shaw endeavored to prevent Asquith’s government from executing
Roger Casement, an Irishman who had attempted to secure supplies
of armaments for Irish revolution from Germany. Casement had also
attempted to enlist British military prisoners of war in Germany who
were Irish to join a brigade to fight for Irish independence. While
Shaw wrote a speech for Casement to deliver during his trial, he also
used journalistic efforts on behalf of Casement, but to no avail.
Casement was hanged on August 3, 1916. Casement, who had
resigned from Britain’s Foreign Office in 1911, had been previously
knighted for his work in exposing atrocities committed against
rubber plantation workers in Belgium-occupied Congo. In 1915,
Casement refuted the British government’s Blue Book, published in
spring 1915, that chronicled German war atrocities. Casement’s
essay, titled “The Far-Extended Baleful Power of the Lie” was
published in fall 1915 in The Continental Times, an English-
language paper published in Germany. No doubt, this essay added
to Asquith’s government’s desire to try Casement for treason.
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CHAPTER 6
Epilogue
In Common Sense About the War, in the very section where he advocated a
socialist outcome to prevent future wars, Shaw stated: “the people are
incapable of the truth” (100). No doubt this was further provocation to
prompt “the people” into thinking about the truth behind the Great War.
Certainly Shaw’s early war journalism collectively helped to dispel the
melodramatic ideals of the previous century, such as Tennyson’s 1854
“Charge of the Light Brigade,” that the popular press had tried to promote
in the war’s early months. Shaw’s effort on this front was driven home by
the conflict’s relentless and horrific casualties. From Shaw’s point of view,
questioning journalism was justified.
The New Journalism that exploded in the 1880s London meant more
and more news was being presented to the public, and the best journalism
strived to sift and extract the truth from fantastic nonsense that was being
fed to the public for popular effect. Although T. P. O’Connor may not have
introduced this process consciously, it was certainly enhanced under his
editorship of The Star through the young journalists and future editors he
worked with from 1888 into 1890. The names of these individuals are
scattered throughout this book as they published many of Shaw’s important
journalistic responses and contributed in their own right to the modernizing
age: H. W. Massingham, Ernest Parke, Thomas Marlowe, and Robert
Donald. Of course, not all of these editors were prepared to always embrace
Shaw’s views, but all, at times, gave space for Shaw’s copy.
It is true, of course, that O’Connor’s The Star, had at one time exploited
and sensationalized the 1888 Whitechapel murders as much as or more than

Journalism, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49007-6_6
any other London paper at the time, but that was through then leader writer
Parke. And the paper did provide commentary on poverty in Whitechapel,
which was picked up and reported by other papers of the period. It is also
true that this commentary, approved by O’Connor, did harshly criticize the
then ruling Conservative government using sensational and blatantly parti-
san political attacks, but the paper did expose the truth—that poverty was a
product of conventional politics and wanton capitalism. And through all
this, O’Connor gave Shaw a platform, even when he did not agree with
everything that Shaw had to say. Shaw contextualized the respectable
classes’ fascination with the gruesome murders and the blood-filled
reporting and attempted to provoke solutions to the poverty issue. It
might be unpalatable, but modernizing journalism owed much to the
grotesque, nightmarish images leader writers conjured up whilst describing
the horrific Ripper murders. The Star’s Whitechapel murder coverage can be
considered good or bad, but from it nevertheless emerged many noted
journalists of the era. Such journalism owed much to W. T. Stead.
Stead had demonstrated in 1884 and 1885, while editor of the Pall Mall
Gazette, the potential power and influence that the New Journalism could
attain through his journalistic efforts that changed the government’s spend-
ing policy on the navy and forced Parliament’s passage of the Criminal Law
Amendment Act to address childhood prostitution. However, Stead’s
pioneering efforts in the sensationalizing direction of the New Journalism
also revealed the dangerous excesses of that journalism, which led to a
preference for popularism over the truth. The effects of this, as illustrated
by the Titanic sinking, led to fabricated truths when the truth was vague or
entirely unknown. The extreme danger of such popularism was that it
sustained beliefs in archaic values of the past, such as sentiments expressed
by Tennyson in the mid-nineteenth century, and similar melodramatic
propensities which remained popular into the second decade of the twen-
tieth century. Stead had shown that powerful politicians like Charles Stewart
Parnell could be felled by sensationalizing popular morality even when the
issues had no real connection to the individual’s politics and political agenda
that were, arguably, advancing society for the better in this case. Of course,
journalism of this kind could also be employed to drive political figures off
the stage and might have a positive effect, as both Shaw and Lord
Northcliffe realized. However, even when Stead employed his journalistic
talent to support his peace agendas, he continued to reveal the dangers of
linking journalism to popularization, one example being his favoring of
despotic tyrannical Russian tsars which played to popular views about the
EPILOGUE 219
English monarchy. Such ideas found their way into the popular politics of
the Liberal Party and its foreign policy up to 1914, or at least made political
alliances with Russia palatable to the British public. Ultimately, Stead’s
influence prompted the best and worst in modernizing journalism, and
that influence certainly fueled Shaw’s career in journalism. Shaw monitored
Stead for decades and responded to him positively or negatively as circum-
stances required.
Shaw’s journalism developed over three decades to represent the power
of modern journalism. It started to emerge in the late 1880s, which allowed
his voice and style to mature before he became a playwright. His journalism,
which became a sideline once his theatrical career had taken off, he was
married, and he no longer relied on it for his income, addressed the colossal
issues of his day. In 1912, when reporting on the Titanic exploded into
melodramatic claptrap, Shaw’s journalistic response brought reason to the
calamity and began the rational process of addressing the causes in a quest to
prevent a repeat scenario. Shaw illuminated how modern journalism needed
to function. His words on the popular press’ coverage of the sinking led to
public and official inquiries about lifeboat No. 1 and the realities about the
sinking, not awash in heroic actions and heroes, but replete in industrial
greed and incompetence that led to many needless deaths. When the Great
War began, Shaw’s journalism was present to question and illuminate
incompetent British foreign policy that locked the country, and indeed
the world, into a mechanized war that produced unparalleled suffering—
while in the early months of the conflict the popular presses, Liberal,
Conservative, and Labour alike, extolled the virtues of patriotism on behalf
of the government but lied to the public about why and how the war was
being fought.
As Shaw noted in More Common Sense About the War, London journal-
ists slowly began to follow his questioning style once the war entered its
second year. He noted that Lord Northcliffe’s Times exposed the alarming
artillery shell shortages at the British front in early 1915 and effectively
removed the popular Lord Kitchener from command of the army. By May,
the pressure from Northcliffe’s papers, both The Times and the Daily Mail,
forced Herbert Asquith to remove Winston Churchill from the Admiralty,
with Churchill taking much of the blame for the initial failure at Gallipoli.
Asquith then formed a coalition government with Conservatives. By late
1916, Northcliffe’s papers were still furthering Shaw’s example as they then
drove Asquith and Edward Grey out of office, while advocating David
Lloyd George as the new prime minister.
Cognizant of the power of journalism on becoming prime minister,

Lloyd George tried quickly to gain Northcliffe’s favor by inviting him to
join his war cabinet (Griffiths, 202). Declining, Northcliffe eventually
accepted a position heading Britain’s War Mission to the United States
during the summer of 1917. Speaking in America, Northcliffe stated:
I am in America because I have been a continual eye witness at the War on its
various fronts, at the War behind the battle line, and in . . . the most serious
part of the War, the home front, the war with politicians. I am here because I
want to tell Americans something of the many blunders we made. (qtd. in
Griffith, 203).
Such words could almost have been spoken by Shaw. Indeed,

Northcliffe’s criticisms of British war governments were in Shaw’s war
journalism tradition. But in 1914 Northcliffe’s newspapers uttered no
such sentiments, preferring to advocate enlistment for King and Country
and condemning any criticism aimed at the government, especially Shaw’s
Common Sense About the War. Northcliffe eventually accepted Lloyd
George’s offer of Director of Propaganda in 1918, a role he was most suited
for given his decades of propagandizing militarism through his various
papers and serials. No doubt Northcliffe believed he was contributing to
Britain’s victory or at least survival.
While Northcliffe’s discussions in America in 1917 were helpful in draw-
ing the United States into the war as Britain’s ally, by 1916 the country’s
newspapers were already following Shaw’s example and addressing the truth
about the conflict. They were not inclined to romanticize the war and
refrained from glossing over the horrific numbers of casualties in the
European trenches and on Gallipoli’s beaches and cliffs. In July 1916, the
New York Sun reported: “Nothing remains but brutality and horror; all
the glamor and romance are crushed out of life in this hideous catastrophe.
Joy is dead, hope is dead, nothing is left on earth but gloom and death”
(qtd. in Daniels, 13). Many papers, British and American, now replicated
Shaw’s example, and the examples of similarly minded journalists,
questioning, criticizing, and telling the truth. The free press during the
Great War had been preserved and saved by the Dubliner Shaw and those
who now followed his example over the deceased Stead.
In 1918, Shaw wrote a preface for a book he intended to publish—a
collection of his Great War journalism—but the volume was not completed
EPILOGUE 221
at the time. In this preface, which J. L. Wiesenthal and Daniel O’Leary

published later as “What I Said in the Great War,” Shaw contextualized
much of his writing by explaining the public positions propagandized by the
government and the popular papers. He specifically addressed the popular
beliefs held by all nations during the conflict about atrocities committed by
soldiers in opposing armies. Shaw explained that the reality of human nature
dictated that all armies were responsible for criminal behavior: “Thus to
expect the British army or the German army to be free from crime is as
unreasonable as to expect London or Berlin to be free from crime” (234).
Shaw was endeavoring to undermine or counter beliefs fostered by popular
presses that demonized all enemy soldiers—but specifically Germans. Shaw
realized that the war was then coming to an end and, as he had been since
1914, was concerned about how the peace was to be determined by
(as seemed likely in 1918) England, France, and the United States. To try
and persuade the public that not all German soldiers were brutal criminals,
Shaw reminded the population that Britain, as was the case in every country,
had its share of horrendous criminals that deserved to be imprisoned or
hanged. For emphasis he added: “just as we should have hanged our English
Jack-the-Ripper if we had caught him” (235). It was an interesting com-
ment, referring to a brutal criminal who had become known through a form
of the New Journalism. The Ripper became known globally thanks to the
sensational reporting of the popular press in London in 1888.
In 1909, Shaw wrote a preface to Three Plays by Brieux, which was
published in 1911 with one play, Maternity, translated by his wife Char-
lotte. In his preface, “From Moliere to Brieux,” Shaw included a subsection
with the heading—as if a subheading in a journalistic leader—“Jack the
Ripper.” Shaw addressed how he worked and wrote in the sensationalized
world Stead and his followers had created:
What they [the public] like to read is the police intelligence, especially the
murder cases and divorce cases [covered in the sensational press]. The
invented murders and divorces of the novelists and playwrights do not satisfy
them, because they cannot believe in them; and the belief that the horror and
scandal actually occurred, that real people are shedding real blood and real
tears is indispensable to their enjoyment. To produce this belief by works of
fiction, the writer must disguise and even discard the acts of the man of letters
and assume the style of the descriptive reporter of the criminal courts. As an
example of how to cater to such readers, we may take Zola’s Bete Humaine
[sic]. It is in all its essentials a simple and touching story . . .
But into it Zola has violently thrust the greatest police sensation of the XIX
century: the episode of Jack the Ripper. Jack’s hideous neurosis is no more
part of human nature than Caesar’s epilepsy or Gladstone’s missing finger.
One is tempted to accuse Zola of having borrowed it from the newspaper . . .
[so the public could] still [. . .] listen to what he was inspired to say. (xi–xii)
As a journalist Shaw always strove to peel back mere shock effects to offer
truth that would provoke intelligent debate and consideration. Shaw the
dramatist reflected on such barbaric sensationalism within the Great War in
Heartbreak House in which characters view a German Zeppelin bombing
raid that kills and destroys as entertainment. On realizing that Mangan and
another character were killed by a Zeppelin bomb, Hesione Hushabye
states: “But what a glorious experience! I hope they’ll come again tomor-
row night,” to which Ellie answers, “Oh, I hope so” (181). This was not
only a devastating commentary on the war and its numbing effects, but also
on the grotesque and sensationalized world that Stead and his like had
created, where the suffering of others becomes amusement and
entertainment.
Shaw witnessed this in the popular press’ coverage of the Whitechapel
murders as papers described and speculated on the obscene horrors inflicted
by the murderer, as if such was fascinating entertainment. He witnessed it
again as the press hounded Parnell over morality as if he was a bear in a vile
bearbaiting spectacle; and again as the papers reported on the Titanic
horror as if it was a melodrama in a West End theatre, where privileged
passengers and the ship’s captain gallantly fought off savage foreigners who
pushed women and children from the lifeboats, rather than facing up to the
greed and incompetence that actually played a bigger part in the sinking of
the ship, rather than a lifeless ice field. And if this was not grotesque enough,
Shaw saw the very same conduct apparent in the early reporting of the Great
War, when the popular press patriotically portrayed government ministers as
steadfast and gallant, when in truth they had led the country and world into
a devastating conflict and horrendous battles through sheer and blatant
incompetence. The journalism Shaw pursued was desperately needed for a
public that rarely listened to, or rarely considered, the truth amid sensation-
alized press articles.
Shaw wrote plays to reach a wide, popular audience and his journalism
was also obviously aimed at a similar public—but with the latter he had to
use the popular press to do so, the very press the socialist Shaw sought to
counter on specific issues. His Dublin socialist counterpart James Connolly
EPILOGUE 223
practiced his journalism in the radical press. Shaw wanted to reach the public
in huge numbers, spread the truth on important issues, and achieve gradual
change. Connolly preferred to target a smaller, more local audience and try
to force immediate change. But working within the popular press was
dangerous for journalists and especially editors. H. W. Massingham, the
subeditor who had hired Shaw for The Star and later published Shaw’s
journalism as the editor of The Star, The Daily Chronicle, and then The
Nation, died in 1924. Shaw provided an essay for a collection of
Massingham’s journalism, and in it he remarked on the editor’s and the
daily journalist’s plight within popular journalism. Specifically he reflected
on the politics the editors of some popular publications were forced to
embrace, usually determined by investors and shareholders who were
often politicians themselves. Shaw noted Massingham as an example:
They [the shareholders] beat him out of The Star, only to find him in a
stronger position editing The Daily Chronicle. They beat him out of The
Daily Chronicle into weekly journalism as editor of The Nation. And they
finally beat him out of The Nation when he was too old to face another
editorship. At least that is one way of summarizing his career; and it is an
important one as an illustration of the final control of the press by those whose
power has hardly any effective check on it except newspaper criticism.
(“H. W. Massingham,” 211)
Of course, after the late 1890s Shaw was not as susceptible to such
politics as he had by then established himself as a playwright and was not
dependent upon journalism for a salary. No doubt this made a great
difference to Shaw’s ability to contribute journalistic criticism as needed—
and there were editors such as Massingham who, at times, published Shaw’s
criticisms even when they were at odds with their given paper’s and share-
holders’ views, and even when they contained criticisms of the government
during the early months of the Great War.
Shaw ended his essay on Massingham’s career by noting:
As I write these lines comes the news of the death of our friend and contem-
porary William Archer. The two vacant places seem to make a prodigious gap
in the surviving front rank of late Victorian journalism. But Archer, like myself,
was a journalist only inasmuch as he wrote for the papers to boil his pot.
Massingham was the perfect master journalist: the born editor without whom
such potboiling would have been for many of us a much poorer and more
sordid business. (“H. W. Massingham,” 216)
The potboiling projection of truth from modern journalists in Shaw’s

vein, and from those who were not quite on his level, greatly informed and
educated the public, which led to a modernization of the Western world.
The impact of Shaw’s journalism was indisputable and played a significant
role in the world he encountered. As he stated in Common Sense About the
War, he wrote history. It was a history that sought to provoke a future
betterment of society— Shaw needed to provide it and he needed to be
encountered by a public hypnotized by popular sensationalism.
In 1921, commemorating the Manchester Guardian’s history and cen-
tennial, its editor C. P. Scott—who had refused to publish one of Shaw’s
journalistic war letters in September 1914 because it questioned the (inept)
government his paper supported—wrote: “Comment is free, but facts are
sacred . . . The voice of opponents no less than friends has the right to be
heard” (“History of the Guardian”). During the Great War Scott came to
realize what T. P. O’Connor had recognized in 1888, that Shaw’s journal-
ism, which consistently strove to illuminate facts for serious and valuable
debate, represented the finest of modern journalism and remains an exam-
ple to emulate. It needed to be heard. On July 22, 1916, after Northcliffe’s
Times rejected it, Scott published Shaw’s “Shall Roger Casement Hang?”
Shaw opposed popular London opinion, arguing that the Irishman Case-
ment, convicted of facilitating the delivery of German guns for Irish rebels,
be treated as a prisoner of war rather than a traitor to be hanged. Casement
was hanged on August 3, 1916, and took his place with James Connolly and
the other Irish rebels executed in 1916. Debate indeed.
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INDEX
A B
Abberline, Frederick George, 52n32, Balfour, Arthur, 31, 50n22
54n40 Barker, Harley Granville, 92, 114
Acton, William, 46n3 Barrie, J. M., 147n35, 168
Albert, King, 175, 176, 210n25 Bashkirtseff, Marie, 76
Alexander II, Tsar, 47n9 and The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff,
Alexander III, Tsar, 19, 20, 47n9, 76, 139
47n10, 84, 85, 88 The Battle of Dorking, 181
(HMS) Amphion, 160 Battle of Mons, 166, 167
Anarchists, 11, 16, 34, 51n27 Battle of the Somme, 204, 205
Andover Standard, 25 Battle of Ypres, 179
Anglo-Russian Convention, 1907, Belfast Telegraph, 148–9n42
206n2 Bentham, Ethel, 146n28
Archer, William, 3, 223 Besant, Annie, 20, 96n13
Armstrong, Eliza, 14, 15 (HMS) Birkenhead, 117, 122, 125,
Arnold, Matthew, 10 132, 145n26
Asquith, Margot, 127 The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, 27–8
Asquith, Sir Herbert, 39, 93, 109, 114, Blatchford, Robert, 166, 181, 182, 186,
115, 149, 154, 157, 162–6, 168, 189, 195
169, 175, 184, 189, 194, 204, Bloch, Ivan, 87
207n8, 208n13, 211n29, 213n44, and Is War Now Impossible?, 87
219 Boer War, 1899-1901, 6, 91, 92, 104,
Astor, Colonel John Jacob, 115 153, 154
Note: Page numbers with “n” denote notes.

Journalism, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49007-6
240 INDEX
Bond, Dr. Thomas, 53n36 and “The Far-Extended Baleful

Booth, Bramwell, 14, 15, 176 Power of the Lie,” 213n44
Booth, Charles, 82 Cavell, Edith, 212–13n39
and The Life and Labour of the People Cavendish, Frederick, 31
of London, 82 Cavendish, Tyrell, 116
Booth, William, 42, 55n41, 80–2, Cavendish, William, 70
99n27 Chamberlain, Joseph, 93–4n2
and In Darkest England and the Way Chamberlain, Lord, 43
Out, 80–2, 99n27, 99n28 Chapman, Annie, 23–8, 36, 49n19–21,
Bowyer, Thomas, 41 51–2n31
Brieux, Eugene, 39, 221 Charles, D. H., 198–9
British Army, 149n42, 166, 167, 173, Chartist Movement, 77
186, 197, 200, 206n4, 207n7, Chesterton, G. K., 95n10, 176
210n23, 221. See also British Chicago World’s Fair, 1893, 83
Expeditionary Force Christie, Agatha, 208–9n16
British Board of Trade Inquiry Titanic, The Chronicle Herald, 119
6, 115, 120, 125, 127, 129, Clarke, Tom, 200
142n12, 148n38 Cleveland Street Case, 54
British Expeditionary Force, 165, 166, Clifford, John, 64–6, 75, 95n10
179. See also British Army Cockerell, Sidney, 9
British Navy, 7, 11–12, 92, 146n31 Connolly, James, 142n9, 143n12, 163,
Brwa, Shendar, 29. See also Shaw, 189, 197, 200, 203, 204, 206–7n5,
George Bernard 207n8, 208n10, 212n37, 222–4
Bryant and May Matchstick Factory and and “Our Duty in the Crisis,” 206n5
Strike and Workers, 20, 42, 84 and “The War Upon the German
Buchanan, Robert, 53n39 Nation,” 207n8
Bulletin, 176 Conservative Party (Tory Party), 12, 39,
Burke, Thomas Henry, 31 51n28, 62, 70, 74
The Burra Record, 164 Contagious Disease Acts, 1864 and
Butt, Major Archibald, 111, 114 1869, 46n3
The Continental Times, 213n44
Cork Daily Herald, 98n21
C Corno di Bassetto, 64. See also Shaw,
Cadbury, George, 123, 161 George Bernard
California, 136–7, 139 Costa Concordia, 121
Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, 109 Crimean War, 19, 199
Campbell, Henry, 72, 98n21, 109 Criminal Investigation Department
Campbell, Stella, 170 (CID), 24, 48n16, 53n37. See also
Carnegie, Andrew, 81, 106, 111 London Metropolitan Police
Carpathia, 118 Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885,
Carter, William F., 115–16 14
Casement, Roger, 213n44, 224 Crippen, Dr. Hawley, 54n40
INDEX 241
Croke, William, Archbishop of Cork, 64 Dublin Employers Federation, 96n160

Cromwell, Oliver, 187 Dublin Lockout, 1913, 96n16, 140,
Cunard Line, 211n33 141n3, 163, 200, 204
Curzon, Lord, 179 Duff-Gordon, Lady, 6, 118, 119, 123,
125, 127–30, 144n20, 147n35,
147n37, 148n38
D Duff-Gordon, Sir Cosmo, 119, 127–9
Daily Chronicle, 5, 64, 88, 90, 109, 153, Dynamitards, 34, 51n27
155, 182, 223
Daily Citizen, 158, 193, 194
Daily Express and the Globe, 194 E
Daily Herald, 98n21, 138, 146n28 Easter Rising, Dublin 1916, 188, 197,
Daily Mirror, 119, 158, 165, 168, 169, 200, 201, 204, 211n27, 213n41
193 Eddowes, Catherine, 36, 37, 52n32
Daily Mirror’s “Spirit of Edward VII, King, 110, 156
Contradiction,” 193 Elsie, Lily, 147n35
Daily News, 6, 45, 119, 123, 128, 129, Ervine, St. John, 79
133, 137, 156, 157, 161, 164, 166, Euston, Lord, 54n40
203, 208n13, 210n21, 220. See also Evening News, 13
Daily News and Leader Evening Telegraph, 103
Daily News and Leader, 156, 161, Everyman, 168, 199
208n13, 210n21, 220
Daily Paper, 104–5, 141n1
Daily Sketch, 114–17, 119, 120, 122, F
124, 125, 127–9, 137, 143n14, Fabian Society, 3, 11, 28, 64, 74, 91,
143n15, 144n18, 145n25, 145n26 131, 135, 148n41, 160
Daily Telegraph, 25, 26, 44, 160, 176 First Balkans War, 1913, 140
Davitt, Michael, 61, 93n1 Foreign Office, 6, 154, 156, 174, 183–6,
Defense of the Realm Act 1914 194, 203, 211n28, 213n44
(DORA), 154, 160, 161, 193, 194 Foreign Secretary. See Grey, Sir Edward
Denshawai, 161, 166, 184, 207n7 Fortnightly Review, 78, 96n14
Denver Post, 115 Francatelli, Mabel (Miss Franks), 118,
Devon and Exeter Gazatte, 118 128, 147n37
Dickens, Charles, 123, 199 Franks, Miss. See Francatelli, Mabel
Dilke, Charles, 93–4n2 (Miss Franks)
Dilnot, Frank, 158, 193, 194 Freeman’s Journal, 71, 103, 196, 197,
Donald, Robert, 155, 217 212n37
Douglas, James, 205
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 6, 44, 73,
90–1, 129–38, 142n10, 148n39, G
148–9n42, 168, 179 Gallipoli, Turkey, 167, 199, 211n33,
and on Shaw and “Titanic,” 129–38 219, 220
242 INDEX
Gardiner, Alfred George (A. G.), 123, (HMS) Hawke, 120

156, 161 Healy, T. M., 46n2, 70, 71, 73, 76,
Girdlestone, E. D., 71, 72, 96n13 97n20
Gladstone, Henry, 72 Hearst, William Randolph, 111,
Gladstone, William, 4, 10–12, 47n6, 144n20
47n7, 63, 64, 66–8, 70–2, 74, 79, Higgins, President Michael D., 15, 45,
84, 95–6n12, 96n16, 98n21, 184, 126, 139
222 Hitchins, Quarter-Master R., 125
Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, 79 Holmes, H. H., 83
Gonne, Maud, 48n11 Home Rule. See Irish Home Rule
Graham, Robert Cunningham, 134, Hopkins, Tighe, 30, 50n22
148n40 Hughes, Hugh Price, 67, 69, 88
The Graphic, 72
Great War (World War I), 1, 2, 6, 7, 9,
20, 74, 91, 108, 110, 126, 127, I
129, 133, 138, 140, 142n10, 153– The Illustrated London News, 37, 203,
5, 167, 170, 178, 182, 192, 193, 213n41
200, 205, 206n4, 208n10, International Mercantile Marine, 116
210n23, 210n27, 217, 220–4 Invincibles, 31, 34, 51n27
Gregory, Lady Augusta, 79, 97n19, Irish Citizen Army, 149n42, 163, 189,
211n33 200, 211n27
Grey, Sir Edward, 141n6, 155, 174, Irish Home Rule, 16, 18, 24, 31, 59, 61,
180, 184, 219 78, 148n42, 170, 210n27
Grey, Sir Henry, 109, 110 Irish Independent, 204
Gurly, Walter, 136 Irish National League, 79
Irish Party (Irish Parliamentary Party),
4, 5, 10, 17, 19, 31, 46, 50n22, 59,
H 61–4, 66–71, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80,
Hague Peace Conference, 1899, 91, 94n3, 210n27
109 Irish Review, 78, 149n42
Hague Peace Conference, 1907, 91, Irish Transport and General Workers’
109 Union, 163
Halfpenny Marvel, 166 Irish volunteers, 179, 200, 210n27
Harcourt, Sir William, 66 Irish Worker, 113, 163, 207n8, 212n37
Harland and Wolfe Shipyard, 143n12 Ismay, J. Bruce, 116, 117, 122, 124,
Harmsworth, Alfred. See Northcliffe, 125, 131, 134, 143n15, 146n32
Lord (Alfred Harmsworth) Issacs, Sir Rufus, 129
Harris, Frank, 13, 78, 103
Harrison, Frederick, 69, 96n14
Hartington, Lord, 70. See also J
Cavendish, William Jack the Ripper, 37, 53n39, 72, 221,
Hartley, Wallace, 144n18 222. See also Whitechapel
INDEX 243
J. C. See Shaw, George Bernard M

Joyce, James, 46, 48n13, 79, 97n18, MacDiarmada, Seán, 200
167, 211n31 MacKenna, Stephen, 142n8
Mackintosh, Amelia. See Shaw, George
Bernard
K Macnaghten, Melville, 48n16
Kelly, Mary Jane (or Mary Kelly), 37–9, Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, 141
41, 43, 51n24, 53n36, 72 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 176
King Albert’s Book, 175, 176 Magny, Jules, 47, 75, 77
Kitchener, Lord, 169, 179, 198, 219 Manchester Guardian, 62, 168,
208n14, 224
Mann, Tom, 184, 186, 208n10
L Marconi wireless, 137
Labouchere, Henry Du Pre, 72 Markievicz, Countess Constance,
Lapworth, Charles, 138 213n41
Larkin, James, 97n16 Marlowe, Thomas, 117, 217
Leven and Melville, Earl, 165 Massingham, H. W., 18, 47n8, 50n22,
Lewis, Sir George, 72 55n40, 64, 65, 67, 80, 88, 91,
Liberal Party (and Liberal 97n17, 153, 165, 176, 210n26,
Government), 4–6, 10, 12, 16, 18, 217, 223
19, 25, 31, 33, 46, 47n6, 47n7, Masterman, C. F. G., 168
51n28, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, 95n11
73, 74, 79, 84, 93, 108, 109, Matthews, Henry, 23–5, 31, 33, 48n16,
141n6, 149n42, 154, 155, 159, 94n3
168, 184, 186, 219 Maxse, Admiral, 181, 182
Lightoller, Second Officer Charles, 115, Maxwell, General John, 204
138, 143n13, 145n24 McCarthy, John, 41
The Link, 20 McDonagh, Thomas, 200
Llais Llafur, 194 Means, Reverend Andres, 27
Lloyd George, David, 171, 209n21, The Men and Religion Foreword
219, 220 Movement Conference, 111
Lloyd’s Illustrated Newspaper, 14 Mersey, Lord, 136
Lloyd’s Weekly, 116 Methodist Times, 67
London, Jack Miller, James, 37, 41, 46n3, 51n24
and The People of the Abyss, 55n42 Milyukov, Pavel, 141n5
London Metropolitan Police (LMP), Minority Report of the Royal
17, 23, 31, 52n32, 53n37 Commission on the Poor Law and
London Opinion, 169, 224 the Relief of Distress, 1909. See
Lord, Captain Stanley, 137 Webb, Beatrice
Lowe, Fifth Officer Harold, 117, 131, Moody, Sixth Officer James P., 131
143n15, 146n32, 147n34 Moore, George, 53n38, 55n39, 63
Lusitania, 211–12n33 Morgan, J. P., 116
Lusk, George, 37, 53n35 Morley, John, 19, 66, 67
244 INDEX
Munro, James, 48–9n16, 94n3 50n22–4, 51n25, 53n38, 55n40,

Murphy, William Martin, 96n16, 204 59, 61, 64–6, 155, 167, 171, 172,
Murray, Gilbert, 176, 177 176, 184, 217, 218, 224
My Secret Life, 63 Olivier, Sidney, 74, 97n17
Olympic, 120, 144n19
O’Reilly, John Boyle, 170, 209n18
N O’Reilly, Mary Boyle, 7, 169, 170, 173,
The Nation, 153, 223 209n17, 209n19, 209n21, 210n22
National Gallery of Ireland, 9, 211n33 and “Cleverest Man in England Talks
National Vigilance Association, 38 to Mary Boyle O’Reilly-George
naval flogging(s), 7 Bernard Shaw Slashes Right and
Navy League, 5, 88, 90, 181, 182 Left,” 171
Nelson, Lord Horatio, 124, 131, 135, Orsova, 119, 120, 145n23
146n31 Orwell, George, 211n30
Newbolt, Henry, 181, 182 Osbourne, Lord Sidney Godolphin, 26,
the New Statesman, 7, 9, 153, 160, 176, 27
193, 198, 200 O’Shea, Captain William, 4, 59, 61, 62,
Newton, Arthur, 54 67, 69, 72, 77, 80, 93n2, 94n7
New York American, 140, 149n43, O’Shea, Katharine, 5, 59, 61, 62, 65,
212n35 72, 75, 76, 97n19, 98n21
New York Call, 171
New York Sun, 220
New York Times, 171, 175, 196 P
New York World, 142n8 Pall Mall Gazette, 2, 3, 11, 13, 15–23,
New Zealand Truth, 164 25, 29, 33, 38, 41, 47n10, 59–61,
Nicholas II, Tsar, 5, 85, 87, 88, 90, 93, 67, 70, 103, 104, 112, 181. See also
106, 108, 110, 156, 170, 178, Stead, W. T.
207n5, 207n9 Parke, Ernest, 23, 24, 38, 48n14,
Nichols, Polly, 22–4 49n17, 54–5n40, 107, 217, 218
Northcliffe, Lord (Alfred Harmsworth), Parnell, Charles Stewart, 4, 5, 10, 31,
7, 88, 117, 165–8, 176, 182, 193, 33, 46, 59–100, 105, 126, 155,
194, 196, 198, 205, 218–20, 224 158, 178, 198, 218, 222
North London Press, 54 Parnell Commission, 31, 39, 61, 94n3
Paternoster Review, 72
Payne-Townsend, Charlotte. See Shaw,
O Charlotte
Oberammergau Passion Play, 86 Pearse, Padraig, 200
O’Brien, William, 46n2 Peuchen, Major, 125, 147n33
O’Casey, Sean, 79 Phillips, Dr. George Bagster, 49n20
O’Connor, Feargus, 77, 98n22 Pigott, Richard, 31, 62, 72, 74
O’Connor, T. P., 4, 17–25, 28, 29, Pittsburg Post-Gazette, 210n24
31–3, 45, 47n8, 48n12, 49n17, Pluck, 166
INDEX 245
Plunkett, Joseph, 200 on Asquith, 154, 162, 163, 166, 168,

Potter, Beatrice, 82. See also Webb, 184, 194, 204, 208n13, 213n44,
Beatrice 219
prostitution, 4, 11–18, 23, 41–5, on Captain Edward Smith, 121, 130,
46–7n3, 55n40, 55n42, 83, 218 131, 134, 135, 139, 140, 179
on the Easter Rising, 188, 197, 201,
213n41
R essays; Fabian Tracts: Fabian Tract
Redmond, John, 210–11n27 No. 41, 64; “H. W. Massingham,”
Reform Act, 1884, 18 18, 50n22, 55n40, 64, 80, 88, 176,
Review of Reviews, 5, 60, 61, 76, 84, 86, 217, 223; “The Transition to Social
91, 104, 111, 139, 141n2, 148n39, Democracy,” 23
165 on Foreign Office, 6, 154, 156,
Rhodes, Cecil, 60 183–6, 194, 203, 213n44
Roosevelt, Theodore, 111 on Gladstone, 11, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74
Russell, Bertram, 165, 177, 199, 205, on The Great War, 1, 2, 6, 7, 9, 20,
206 74, 91, 108, 110, 126, 127, 129,
and “The Rights of the War,” 165 138, 153–5, 182, 193, 205,
and War, The Offspring of Fear, 199 206n4, 208n10, 210n23, 217,
Russian-Japanese War, 107, 142n8 220–4
Russian Revolution, 1905, 93, 108, on Grey, 110, 155–9, 161, 162, 164,
142n8 166, 168, 169, 183, 190, 207n7,
219
on Ireland, 3, 15, 18, 31, 46, 47n4, 73,
S 140, 149n42, 170, 189, 194–206,
St. James’s Gazette, 34, 99n31 209n19, 212n36, 212n37
Salisbury, Lord (Robert Cecil), 17–19, journalism; “The Abolition of
24, 39, 47n6, 94n3 Christmas,” 39, 40; “Armaments
Salvation Army, 14, 15, 29, 80–2 and Conscription: A Triple
Sanger, William W., 46 Alliance Against the War,” 155;
Sarolea, Charles, 168, 169, 199 “A Balfour Ballad,” 31, 50n22;
Saturday Review, 34, 44, 55n44, 78, “Blood Money to Whitechapel,”
104, 110, 165 32, 40, 42, 44, 50n23, 51n25,
Scotland Yard, 24, 38, 52n32 54n40, 171; “Cleverest Man in
Scott, C. P., 62, 168, 179, 208n14, 224. England Talks to Mary Boyle
See also Manchester Guardian O’Reilly-George Bernard Shaw
Shakespeare, William, 1, 44 Slashes Right and Left,” 171;
Sharp, Clifford, 153, 175, 178, 185, Common Sense about the War, 9,
191, 198, 200, 201 155, 169, 175, 179, 181, 192,
Shaw, Charlotte, 113, 119, 120, 128, 160 193, 195, 198, 205, 210n22,
Shaw, George Bernard 210n26, 211n29, 217, 219, 220;
246 INDEX
“Demonstration Against the “Poor Law and Destitution in

Tsar,” 110; “The Easter Week Ireland” 47n4, 103, 125,
Executions,” 203, 204; 209n19; Redistribution of
“Flogging in the Navy,” 8, 92; Income Lectures, 160, 196
“G. B. S. and Nihilism,” 107; “I on Parnell, 5, 31, 46, 59, 60, 64–93,
Have Nothing to Withdraw,” 99n26, 126, 155, 198
205; “Insensate Malice,” 195; plays; Androcles and the Lion, 5; Arms
“The Madness of This War,” and the Man, 55n40, 75, 85, 86,
158, 159, 167, 172; More 143n14, 148n40, 154, 174;
Common Sense about the War, Augustus Does His Bit, 173; The
198, 219; “Mr. Bernard Shaw’s Doctor’s Dilemma, 5, 113;
Surprising Views about the War,” Fanny’s First Play, 113; Getting
196, 212n35; “The Need for Married, 5, 78, 98, 113;
Criticism,” 199; “Neglected Heartbreak House, 140, 199,
Morals of the Rising,” 200–1; 211n33, 222; John Bull’s Other
“A Northumberland Street Island, 16, 73, 113, 207n7;
Ballad,” 20; “Open Letter to the Major Barbara 5, 15, 29, 80–2,
President of the United States of 92, 105, 106, 109, 110, 113,
America,” 176; “The Other Side: 140, 141n2, 162, 182; Man and
Bernard Shaw Repeats His Superman, 5, 92, 113; Mrs
Sticking Tight Advice,” 67; “The Warren’s Profession, 15, 41,
Peril of Potsdam: Our Business 55n43, 113; O’Flaherty, 173,
Now,” 161, 163–5, 172, 186; 197, 206n4, 212n38; The
“Shall Parnell Go?”, 65; “Shall Philanderer, 77, 78; Pygmalion,
Roger Casement Hang?”, 224; 15, 44, 45, 139, 164, 169, 176;
“The Titanic”, 6, 113–22, 126, The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet,
137–9, 154, 155, 159, 179; “The 83; Widowers’ Houses, 40, 41
Titanic: Some Unmentioned prefaces:“From Moliere to Brieux,” 39
Morals, 123; “The Trafalgar reviews:“Vendetta, ” 98n23
Celebration and the Tsar” 102, on Stead, 2–4, 9–23, 28–46, 64, 65,
152, 236,; “Who I Am, and What 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, 83–93,
I Think” (Frank Harris 103–10, 113, 114, 117, 118,
Interview), 103 120–41, 141n1, 153, 154, 156,
journalistic Books; The Common Sense 157, 161, 165, 178–93, 204,
of Municipal Trading, 178; The 206, 207n9, 221
Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1, 5, 75, on Titanic, 113–23, 125, 126,
76, 104; What I Really Wrote 129–39, 159, 179, 198
about the War, 155 on Whitechapel Murders (Jack the
on Lady Duff Gordon, 118, 123, 127–9 Ripper Murders), 4, 28, 31–3,
lectures; “Equality,” 125 , 139, 153; 39, 41, 50n23, 126, 167, 205
“Finishing the Transition to Sheehy-Skeffington, Francis, 78, 84,
Social Democracy,” 23, 32; 200, 202, 213n40, 213n42
INDEX 247
“The Shocking Murder of the East Reviews of Reviews, 5, 60, 61, 64, 76,
End,” 21 83, 84, 86, 91, 93n1, 100n33,
Smith, Captain Edward, 6, 112, 117, 104, 105, 111, 139, 141n2,
120–2, 124, 130, 131, 133–5, 148n39, 165
139–41, 145n24–6, 179 “The Blood-Thirst of the Day,” 21
Smith, Lt. Colonel Sir Henry, 52n32 “The Maiden Tribute to Modern
Smith, William Alden, 146n33 Babylon,” 4, 112
Smyth, William Watkins. See Shaw, “The Truth about the Navy,” 4, 12, 181
George Bernard “To Our Friends the Enemy,” 13
Solomon, Abraham, 118, 119, The Truth about Russia, 20
144–45n21 and Tsar Nicholas II, 87, 93, 110,
Stanely, Henry, 80 156, 178
and In Darkest Africa, 80 War Against War: A Chronicle of the
The Star, 4, 5, 17–25, 28–33, 36–9, Peace Crusade, 90, 91
48n14, 50n22, 50n23, 55n40, 59, Stengal, Charles, 122, 127
64–6, 68, 70, 74, 75, 77, 80, 84, Stoker, Bram, 44
88, 94n4, 96n13, 97n17, 103, 104, and Dracula, 44
107, 153, 155, 167, 171, 184, 205, The Strand, 44
217, 218, 223 Stride, Elizabeth, 36, 43–4
Stead, W. T. Swift, Jonathan, 32, 33, 50n24, 62,
Alexander III, 19, 20, 47n10, 84, 85, 171, 200
88 Sykes Picot Agreement, 212n34
Courie de la Conference de la Paix, Symons, Seaman G., 122, 127
109 Synge, John Millington, 1, 79, 99n25,
Daily Paper, 104, 105, 141n1 142n8, 208n14
“From the Old World to the New,” 112 and The Playboy of the Western World,
“How the Mail Steamer Went Down 79
in the Mid Atlantic,” 112
Journalism: “Editorial,” 18, 19, 21,
29–31, 33, 46n2, 60, 165, 167 T
Journalistic Books: If Christ Came to Tabram, Martha, 22
Chicago, 5, 83, 87, 99n30 Taft, William, 111
“Letters from the Vatican: The Pope Tchaikovski, Nikolai, 47n10
and the New World,” 60 Tennyson, Alfred, 124, 156, 157,
Meetings: “If Christ Came to 206n1, 211n32, 217, 218
London,” 5, 83, 87, 99n30 and “Charge of the Light Brigade,”
Mr. Carnegie’s Conundrum, 81, 111 217
“Murder as an Advertisement,” 29 and “The Ode to Wellington,” 124
and Pall Mall Gazette 2, 3, 11, 13, Thompson, Yates, 60
15–23, 25, 29, 33, 38, 41, 47n10, Times, 4, 7, 17, 18, 22, 25–7, 31, 33, 34,
59–61, 67, 70, 103, 104, 112, 181 37, 39, 61–3, 92, 106, 115, 158,
Parke, Ernest, 23, 38, 54n40, 55, 218 160, 166–8, 196–8, 219, 224
248 INDEX
Titanic, 6, 103–49, 154, 159, 165, 171, Wells, H. G., 100n35, 177, 182
178, 179, 198, 206n2, 212n33, and War in the Air, 181, 182
218, 219, 222 Wharton, Edith, 78, 98n24
Tolstoy, Leo, 84, 107, 142n7, 177 and Ethan Frome, 78
Tory Party. See Conservative Party (Tory Whitechapel, 4, 9–55, 59, 60, 63, 67, 72,
Party) 78, 79, 82, 83, 94n3, 95n7, 113,
T. P.’s Weekly, 167 126, 154, 167, 171, 178, 198, 205,
Trafalgar Square Riot, 1887, 16, 17, 25, 217, 218, 222. See also Jack the
27, 32, 38, 47n5, 51n26, 68, 89, Ripper
148n40 Whitechapel Club, 83
Truth, 4, 54, 71 Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, 37
Twain, Mark, 109, 113 White, Jack, 149n42
White Paper (Foreign Office Public
Records Publication), 183,
U 211n28
Union Jack, 166 White Star Line, 6, 111, 112, 116, 117,
United Ireland, 46n2 120, 122, 126, 131, 134, 137–40,
United States Senate Hearing, Titanic, 143n12, 143n13
115, 117, 143n13, 143n15, Wilde, Chief Officer Henry Tingle, 121
146n33 Wilde, Oscar
and The Importance of Being Earnest,
96n15
V and The Picture of Dorian Grey, 94n7
Vedrenne-Baker Theatre Management, Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 162, 172, 207n6
114 Wilkinson, Spenser, 181
Verdenne, J. E., 114 Wilson, Woodrow, 176
Victoria, Queen, 39, 88 Workers’ Republic, 197, 212n37
Vigilance Association, 24, 38, 53n38 The World, 104
Vizetelly, Henry, 38, 39, 53n38, 93
Y
W Yates, Edmund, 99n33
Walsh, William, Archbishop of Dublin Yeats, Jack B., 208n14
(later Cardinal), 61, 64, 97n20 Yeats, William Butler, 48n11, 79, 97n19
War Office, 6, 154, 186, 210n23 and “Parnell’s Funeral,” 79
Warren, Sir Charles, 17, 23, 24, 27, 28,
31, 34, 36, 37, 44, 48n16
Webb, Beatrice, 82, 138, 153, 164, 166, Z
188, 189 Zola, Emile, 38, 93, 222
Webb, Sidney, 153, 189 and Bete Humaine, 221

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Bernard Shaw

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Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930430

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: © Ian O’Hare

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The impulse to write this volume began to emerge while working on my

realization which, after some contemplation, propelled me to focus on

this project, as is April James, also of Palgrave Macmillan’s London ofﬁce,

I also express great thanks to my dear friend Audrey McNamara, whose

2 Stead and the Whitechapel Frenzy 9

3 Parnell, Disarmament, and the Morality Frenzy 59

4 Stead, Russia, and Titanic 103

© The Author(s) 2017 1

reaction to other writers was also practiced by Shaw in his journalism,

other dramatists—contemporaries or earlier playwrights—he developed and

Shaw endeavored to provoke public debate and social change, while

heard in court in November 1890, when neither Katharine O’Shea nor

some well-placed words in the press, including an interview he granted to

Stead and the Whitechapel Frenzy

© The Author(s) 2017 9

preferred a monument to Shaw the public commentator, rather than merely

STEAD, NAVY, PROSTITUTION, RIOT, AND SHAW

by a Salvation Army woman, arranged by Booth, and placed in domestic

SHAW, O’CONNOR, AND THE STAR

drainage of the vilest production of ordinary vice” (qtd. in Curtis, 246). At

CHRISTIANITY, “BLOOD MONEY,” AND SHAW

suggested that the killer was illuminating the horriﬁc conditions in

If these cesspools of brutalized humanity were not to become a permanent

I am, roughly & practically speaking, in favor of signatures, because, though I

Shaw’s brilliancy emerges in his signed response to the autumn 1888

aristocratic public frenzy stirred by the autumn 1888 sensational murder

O’Connor then moved to Shaw’s leader and attempted to contextualize

[Commissioner] Sir C HARLES W ARREN . . . . In the House of Commons, and

Despite O’Connor’s professed sympathy for East Londoners, he cannot

sociologist endeavoring to draw public, namely West London attention to

SIR.—Will you allow me to make a comment on the success of the Whitechapel

However, these things have to be faced. If the line to be taken is that

Shaw’s ability to remain detached from the frenzy was undoubtedly

caught up in the murder press-riled hysteria, and in resisting respectable

DOUBLE KILLINGS, DOUBLE SENSATIONS

implicated a Jewish suspect—Warren ordered the grafﬁti to be erased before

Everybody turned away disappointed. “Lime’us!” said one man disparagingly,

Astutely, Shaw satirized the sexual sensationalism of bloody brutal vio-

to learn his yearly income is based on the slums Sartorius manages, he is

succinctly explained, as if in an effort to undermine all of the sensationaliz-

were open to a working-class young woman—dangerous factory work

arguably one of the most important examples of Western modern journal-

prostitution could be arrested, forced into an examination, and then

advised some reﬂection on his (Stead’s) public Russian views: “were

which was an advisory board. Numerous police detectives consulted

desperate efforts to survive, with life being reduced to surviving

inquests’ testimony from medical physicians who examined the

hate (Rumbelow, 68). Whatever the meaning, it was discovered next

addition, Shaw referred to Parke: “My friend Parke . . . is menaced

Parnell, Disarmament, and the Morality

In December 1889, roughly a year after Shaw proposed abolishing Christ-

© The Author(s) 2017 59

argues, he had injected sexual scandal “directly in mainstream British jour-

According to Shaw, Stead’s registered telegraphic address was “Vatican

STEAD, AND THE DEMONIZING OF PARNELL