Shaw’s Pygmalion was in a different class

100 years ago today Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ shocked class-ridden Victorian Britain, writes Robert Hume.

ONE hundred years ago tonight in London, Eliza Doolittle shocked and delighted theatregoers when the curtain went up on George Bernard Shaw’s comic masterpiece, Pygmalion.

It was Shaw’s early years in Dublin that inspired him to write his sensational attack on the British class system. Shaw led a “devil of a childhood” as he states in his autobiography, “I was just something that had happened to my parents “and had to be put up with and supported”.