Was Shaw a Victorian? We Need to Ask Another Question

ABSTRACT Shaw scholars have long hesitated to label Shaw a Victorian writer. Although almost half of his life overlapped Queen Victoria’s reign, Shaw’s challenges to nineteenth-century morals and mores tend to mark him as an outlier. This article advocates a fresh approach: perhaps we have been taking the “Victorian” question too literally. Postmodern critics have long urged us to look for diverse and contradictory elements in literary works that seem to be staid and classical. In this article, the author looks for commonalities between Shaw’s Getting Married and three nineteenth-century novels (Eight Cousins, Great Expectations, and Jane Eyre). Do theatrical strategies and fictional writing techniques ever change places? Do the characters in Victorian novels ever explore Shavian ideas? And can we use those commonalities to rethink some of our assumptions about the Victorian era?