Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, of Protestant stock, in 1856, and died at Ayot St Lawrence, Herts, in 1950. After a false start in nineteenth-century fashion as a novelist, he made a reputation as a journalist-critic of books, pictures, music, and the drama. Meanwhile he had plunged into the Socialist revival of the eighteen-eighties and come out as one of the leaders who made the Fabian Society famous, figuring prominently not only as a pamphleteer and platform orator, but as a serious economist and philosopher, publishing major essays on Ibsen and Wagner. He broke out in a new direction in 1892 as a playwright, although it was not until some twelve years later that the opposition he had always to face at first was overcome sufficiently to establish him as an irresistible force in the theatre.