Bernard Shaw: The Diaries. 2 Vols

Title: Bernard Shaw: The Diaries. 2 Vols
Author: Bernard Shaw
ISBN: 0271003863
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Published: 1990
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Condition: Used: Good
Moderate edge wear. Binding good. May have marking in text. We sometimes source from libraries. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.

P 1436685

Publisher Description:

Publication of the Bernard Shaw diaries is a major literary event. The 1885 1897 diaries, originally written in old-fashioned Pitman shorthand, detailed the day-to-day life of Bernard Shaw from his twenty-ninth year, when he was still a nobody, to his forty-second, when he was one of the best-known men in England.

Lost during much of Shaw's lifetime, the diaries surfaced after the war in a bombed warehouse, and were partially transcribed by his long-time secretary, Blanche Patch, in the years before Shaw's death at 94 in 1950. After that, New York scholar Stanley Rypins, self-taught in shorthand, attempted a fuller version, and the first annotations. Now Stanley Weintraub, one of the leading scholars on G.B.S. and his times, has completed, with the aid of a team of shorthand specialists, the definitive transcription of the Shavian shorthand, complete to the last ha'penny noted.

The G.B.S. diaries, as now annotated, are a lens with which to examine "radical" intellectual life in the London of the 1880s and 1890s. We not only meet Shaw striving daily to make something of himself; we also encounter the people on the fringes as well as within the vortex of radical politics in late- Victorian England. Through Shaw the journalist and critic, successively, of books, arts, music, and theater, we confront the writers and books; artists and art; composers, instrumentalists, singers, and conductors, and their music; plays, players, and playwrights of his time a cross-section of late-Victorian culture.

We also learn what it costs to buy a newspaper, get a haircut, ride the Underground, secure a cheap dinner, express a letter, go to the opera, take a lady to tea, rent ice skates, attend a music hall, tip a lavatory attendant or a crossing sweeper, indulge a beggar, replace a typewriter ribbon, visit Madame Tussaud's, use a coin machine for chocolates, black a pair of boots, mail a postcard, cross the Channel, ascertain one's weight, move a piano, give a Christmas presen