Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
COLLINS. Bless you, maam, theres all sorts of bonds between all sorts of people. You are a very affable lady, maam, for a Bishop's lady. I have known Bishop's ladies that would fairly provoke you to up and cheek them; but nobody would ever forget himself and his place with you, maam. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of George Bernard Shaw, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 8362 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
Never mind to-morrow, Hetty. Be like the sun and the meadow, which are not in the least concerned about the coming winter. Why do you stare at that cursed canal, blindly dragging its load of filth from place to place until it pitches it into the sea--just as a crowded street pitches its load into the cemetery? Stare at ME, and give me a kiss. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Put this one on top of your reading list
As the previous reviewer has noted this book is hard to put down. I was most impressed with the author's ability to successfully create a colorful (as in inflection-filled) and thus dynamic commentary. As to the somewhat transparent but, as highlited in the title, central topic, socialism, I feel this book has equally shown the positive and the negative consequences of its application all the while keeping true to its satire.

An Unsocial Socialist
Shaw's last, and in my opinion, best satire, An Unsocial Socialist is awonderful book that is sadly not well known.The plot is pulls you in andthe book spawned an equally great play, "Smash".I couldn't putit down until I finished it. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks.Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG- - A lady and gentleman are making love to one another in the drawing-room of a flat in Ashly Gardens in the Victoria district of London. It is past ten at night. The walls are hung with theatrical engravings and photographs - Kemble as Hamlet, Mrs. Siddons as Queen Katharine pleading in court, Macready as Werner (after Maclise), Sir Henry Irving as Richard III (after Long), Miss Ellen Terry, Mrs. Kendal, Miss Ada Rehan, Madame Sarah Bernhardt, Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, Mr. A. W. Pinero, Mr. Sydney Grundy, and so on, but not the Signora Duse or anyone connected with Ibsen. The room is not a perfect square, the right hand corner at the back being cut off diagonally by the doorway, and the opposite corner rounded by a turret window filled up with a stand of flowers surrounding a statue of Shakespear. The fireplace is on the right, with an armchair near it. A small round table, further forward on the same side, with a chair beside it, has a yellow-backed French novel lying open on it. The piano, a grand, is on the left, open, with the keyboard in full view at right angles to the wall. The piece of music on the desk is "When other lips." Incandescent lights, well shaded, are on the piano and mantelpiece. Near the piano is a sofa, on which the lady and ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
In the first frenzy of microbe killing, surgical instruments were dipped in carbolic oil, which was a great improvement on not dipping them in anything at all and simply using them dirty; but as microbes are so fond of carbolic oil that they swarm in it, it was not a success from the anti-microbe point of view. Formalin was squirted into the circulation of consumptives until it was discovered that formalin nourishes the tubercle bacillus handsomely and kills men. The popular theory of disease is the common medical theory: namely, that every disease had its microbe duly created in the garden of Eden, and has been steadily propagating itself and producing widening circles of malignant disease ever since. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
Fanny's First Play, being but a potboiler, needs no preface. But its lesson is not, I am sorry to say, unneeded. Mere morality, or the substitution of custom for conscience was once accounted a shameful and cynical thing: people talked of right and wrong, of honor and dishonor, of sin and grace, of salvation and damnation, not of morality and immorality. The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car. Nowadays we do not seem to know that there is any other test of conduct except morality; and the result is that the young had better have their souls awakened by disgrace, capture by the police, and a month's hard labor, than drift along from their cradles to their graves doing what other people do for no other reason than that other people do it, and knowing nothing of good and evil, of courage and cowardice, or indeed anything but how to keep hunger and concupiscence and fashionable dressing within the bounds of good taste except when their excesses can be concealed.Is it any wonder that I am driven to offer to young people in our suburbs the desperate advice: Do something that will get you into trouble?But please do not suppose that I defend a state of things which makes such advice the best that can be given under the circumstances, or that I do not know how difficult it is to find out a way of getting into trouble that will combine loss of respectability with integrity of self-respect and reasonable consideration for other peoples' feelings and interests on every point except their dread of losing their own respectability. But when there's a will there's a way.I hate to see dead people walking about:it is unnatural.And our respectable middle class people are all as dead as mutton.Out of the mouth of Mrs Knox I have delivered on them the judgment of her God. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
BLANCO. Not they. Hanging's too big a treat for them to give up a fair chance. Ive done it myself. Ive yelled with the dirtiest of them when a man no worse than myself was swung up. Ive emptied my revolver into him, and persuaded myself that he deserved it and that I was doing justice with strong stern men. Well, my turn's come now. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
Childhood is a stage in the process of that continual remanufacture of the Life Stuff by which the human race is perpetuated. The Life Force either will not or cannot achieve immortality except in very low organisms: indeed it is by no means ascertained that even the amoeba is immortal. Human beings visibly wear out, though they last longer than their friends the dogs. Turtles, parrots, and elephants are believed to be capable of outliving the memory of the oldest human inhabitant. But the fact that new ones are born conclusively proves that they are not immortal. Do away with death and you do away with the need for birth: in fact if you went on breeding, you would finally have to kill old people to make room for young ones ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
Mrs Warren's Profession has been performed at last, after a delay of only eight years; and I have once more shared with Ibsen the triumphant amusement of startling all but the strongest-headed of the London theatre critics clean out of the practice of their profession. No author who has ever known the exultation of sending the Press into an hysterical tumult of protest, of moral panic, of involuntary and frantic confession of sin, of a horror of conscience in which the power of distinguishing between the work of art on the stage and the real life of the spectator is confused and overwhelmed, will ever care for the stereotyped compliments which every successful farce or melodrama elicits from the newspapers. Give me that critic who rushed from my play to declare furiously that Sir George Crofts ought to be kicked.What a triumph for the actor, thus to reduce a jaded London journalist to the condition of the simple sailor in the Wapping gallery, who shouts execrations at Iago and warnings to Othello not to believe him! But dearer still than such simplicity is that sense of the sudden earthquake shock to the foundations of morality which sends a pallid crowd of critics into the street shrieking that the pillars of society are cracking and the ruin of the State is at hand. Even the Ibsen champions of ten years ago remonstrate with me just as the veterans of those brave days remonstrated with them. Mr Grein, the hardy iconoclast who first launched my plays on the stage alongside Ghosts and The Wild Duck, exclaimed that I have shattered his ideals. Actually his ideals! What would Dr Relling say? And Mr William Archer himself disowns me because I "cannot touch pitch without wallowing in it". Truly my play must be more needed than I knew; and yet I thought I knew how little the others know. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Mrs. Warren's Profession
This is a play by George Bernard Shaw.I played the part of Mrs. Warren.It is a marvelous play that was very scandelous for its time (1895).Beautifully written.Mother-daughter conflict.A jewel in Shaw's crown.

A Savage Social Satire of Economics and Hypocrisy
Although it was written in the late 1800s, censorship issues kept George Bernard Shaw's MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION off the stage for close to a decade, and it did not debut publically on the London stage until about 1900.Even after this delay, moralists denounced it as a scandalous play--and it remained controversial well into the mid-20th Century.

The basic story concerns a pragmatic young woman, Vivie, who has spent her life in boarding schools, seeing her mother only on rare occasions.Upon graduation, she now directly confronts her mother and learns the bitter truth: Mrs. Warren is a former prostitute who has risen to the rank of a high class madam, and all of Vivie's education has been built on the profits of her profession.But the play takes an unexpected twist, for instead of sensationalizing or sentimentalizing prostitution, Shaw gives us Mrs. Warren as a business woman who took the only opportunity available to her and through commonsense and a strong work ethic parlayed her meager beginnings into a fortune of note.

The obvious reason for public outcry against the play was Shaw's refusal to condemn Mrs. Warren for prostitution; less obvious but more powerful is the fact that Shaw condemns virtually every character and the society in which they move as grossly hypocritical.It is an incredibly hypocritical society that has forced Mrs. Warren to decide between the virtue of starvation and the sin of success; while easily the most sympathetic role in the play, Mrs. Warren emerges as a garden-variety hypocrite of limited insight; and while we may admire Vivie for her clarity of thought and apparent virtue, she emerges as a young woman of such ferocious self-determination that she is ultimately difficult to like.

MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION was among Shaw's earliest plays, and it pales a bit in comparison to his later, more theatrically sophistocated works; consequently it is seldom revived today.Even so, it is a powerful example of the new style Shaw would forge in theatre, a dark comedy overflowing with complex ideas and wickedly funny ironies.Shaw's tone of voice is both distinct and unique, he reads from the page as well as he plays on the stage, and he would exert a profound influence on drama throughout the 20th Century.Recommended.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Mrs.Warrens Profession: women in society
The play Mrs. Warren's Profession was good, the main charcter was not Mrs. Warren but her daughter Vivie who goes back in and forth in every act between love and hate for her mother who has been a prostitue and ran some brothels. Vivie is convienced her mother could have made a better choice for herself than prostitution. Mrs. Warren has kept Vivie out of the brothels all of her life and gave her the best in education and up bring. But even though she has done all of that Vivie is not content on being there any longer with her mother. End the end Vivie leaves her mother and Mrs. Warren holds her self together unappoligic for anything she has done. This play was a great example of how women had two choices at the time the play was set in marriage or prostitution which were both forms of slavery. Shaw knew how hard it was for women in society and wanted more for them, than just mother hood and marriage.

Mrs. Warren's Profession
Shaw does a wonderful job at showing her "job" without having to tell you.It gives it more of an off limits feel for the job and also makes the listener feel like they are there.Powerful and compelling.

Mrs Warren's Professional daughter
The play Mrs Warren's Profession was one of Shaws plays unpleasent and he wrote it at a time when many people shyed away from the mojority of political and social issues of the time. Shaw had an ability however to lay down the facts of many things that were happening in society and he oftengave the reader or audience a sense of responsibilty that many of thepeople involved were receiving. In Mrs Warren's Profession he focusses onthe hidden world of prostitution without ever mentioning the word or evenspelling it out to the reader/audience. With this he is able to descibe theeffects it has without crudly embarking on a course of discrimination. Allin all it is a powerful piece which shows how women had had influence overthe world in all aspects. ... Read more