Madam, - Peter Gahan (August 26th) provided welcome and pertinent comment on the neglect of George Bernard Shaw in this year of his 150th anniversary by theatres in Dublin and London whose very existence owes a great deal to Shaw's early support of them. Gahan aptly contrasts this situation with the welcome accorded the anniversary elsewhere, and also supplies some good reasons as to why Shaw's plays do not deserve such neglect.
About one thing in the essay, however, I must enter a plea for understanding from Downunder. To say that I am "on the side of respectability" in the treatment of Shaw's family in my Bernard Shaw: A Life misrepresents the case. The Shaws were not particularly remarkable for respectability. In fact they were quite bohemian, and far more interesting than most members of the stuffy Protestant clan to which they belonged. But, beginning with the tales about them in Shaw's autobiographical writing, his parents have been the subject of increasingly absurd character assassination - on the basis of which ill-founded theories about the playwright's adult sexuality have been developed.
It was not the respectability of George Carr and Bessie Shaw I was trying to bring out, but their humanity. In doing so I drew on unpublished materials which have been astonishingly left out of previous Shavian biography. These materials include, for example, the only surviving piece of autobiographical writing by Shaw's mother, and letters written from Dublin by Shaw's father to his son as a struggling novelist in London. Before the publication of my book, these documents had never been so much as mentioned, either by Shaw or any of his biographers. It is difficult to imagine similar omissions in biographical accounts of the family background of William Shakespeare. Could I please trade "decent - and long overdue - scholarship" for "respectability" as a description of the side I am on in my biography of Bernard Shaw? - Yours, etc,
AM GIBBS, Sydney, Australia.