This Day in Theater History (Shaw Quits Job With Edison for Literary Career)

July 5, 1880—Putting behind him his last attempt at a conventional job, George Bernard Shaw quit the Edison Telephone Co. in London, determined to become a professional writer. It would take another five years before he was able to secure a steady gig as a music and art critic, and another dozen before his playwrighting career began in earnest.

How much good does a non-writing position do for an author? William Faulkner, a friend recalled, “made the damnedest postmaster the world has ever seen.”

On the other hand, Dashiell Hammett’s stint with the Pinkerton Detective Agency gave him a decidedly unromantic view of sleuthing that would come in handy when he helped to craft the hard-boiled detective genre, and I recall John Steinbeck’s widow Elaine saying that her husband’s early career in a succession of menial jobs gave him a deep sympathy with labor.

Let’s just say that Shaw’s employment by Edison placed him somewhere between these extremes of total uselessness and unexpected utility. The year before, the 23-year-old Anglo-Irishman had taken a job with “a company…formed in London to exploit the ingenious invention by Mr. Thomas Alva Edison.”

Many young men would have killed for such a job, but not Shaw. He not only had serious questions about the usefulness of Edison’s telephone equipment (“of such stentorian efficiency that it bellowed your most private communication all over the house instead of whispering them with some sort of discretion”) but also found himself something of a fish out of water.

Here’s why: Shaw’s co-workers in the crowded basement of the firm’s London offices were truly alien to him: “deluded and romantic men [who] gave me a glimpse of the skilled proletariat of the United States.” The next sentence of reminiscence is a gem of irony: you can just imagine how Shaw, whose mother taught music, must have been thinking: “They sang obsolete sentimental songs with genuine emotion; and their language was frightful even to an Irishman.”

And yet—something in their character appealed to the cerebral Shaw: ““They [the Americans] were free-souled creatures, excellent company: sensitive, cheerful, and profane; liars, braggarts, and hustlers; with an air of making slow old England hum which never left them even when, as often happened, they were wrestling with difficulties of their own making, or struggling in no-thoroughfares from which they had to be retrieved like straying sheep by Englishmen without imagination enough to go wrong.”

Shaw’s reminiscences of this period are contained in the Preface to his novel The Irrational Knot, which he wrote in 1880 but which did not see publication for another quarter-century, by which time he had become famous (and more or less established) as a playwright. Neither this nor the other two novels Shaw produced ever became commercial successes—and Shaw bluntly admitted to readers that he couldn’t stand the book.

That’s not to say, however, that he gained nothing from his experience. It did give him the opportunity to sharpen his wit and find his voice, with one-liners such as the following (on chess: “a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.” )

Shaw’s novel, incidentally, featured an Irish-American engineer—rather unlike any of his subsequent characters.