Introduction

Stanley Weintraub, writing of Shaw's views on Queen Victoria, has described the dramatist as "one of the Queen's admirers, however reluctant," one who, despite his socialist opposition to monarchy as an institution, "would conduct a curious love affair with her in print all his life."1 Perhaps this ambivalent "love affair" would also be an apt description for Shaw's attitude toward the era that bears Victoria's name.The Victorian period, usually defined as the years of Queen Victoria's reign, between 1837 and 1901, is a period as many-sided and as difficult to define as Shaw himself. It has been variously characterized as a time of breakneck scientific progress and rigid tradition, of widening democracy and insular hierarchy, of imperial expansion and the cult of domesticity, of solemn earnestness and hollow artifice.Scholars have labeled Shaw both as a product of Victorianism and as a rebel against it, an irrepressible herald of the Modern period in which so many revered Victorian ideals were gleefully flung away. A few years after Shaw's death, Howard Mumford Jones proclaimed in the newly founded journal Victorian Studies that he was an exemplar of "the energy, the fecundity, the curiosity of the great Victorians," one who embodied the rationalism of John Stuart Mill, the radicalism of William Morris, the ethical relativism of Herbert Spencer, the hero-worship of Thomas Carlyle.2 Stanley Kauffmann, a few decades later, similarly likened Shaw's vast and varied output of letters, plays, journalism, and other writings to the copious works of Victorian polymaths such as Henry Mayhew, George Henry Lewes, and Tom Taylor, suggesting that the gigantic bulk and scope of Shaw's writings shows him to be "a product of Victorian conditioning."3 Yet he pointed to an important difference: of Shaw's nineteenth-century contemporaries, Kauffmann declared that "their energy seems concentric, whirling in a closed circle around their lives and era," while with Shaw, "the energy seems to whirl forward, to burst continually into a succession of futures."4Shaw was born in 1856, not quite twenty years into the Victorian period, and Victorian England was the backdrop and the pervading atmosphere of his early adult life—his migration from Ireland to London, his struggling attempts at novel-writing, his Fabian Society speeches, and his gradual rise to prominence as a critic, journalist, and dramatist. Of his over fifty plays, only the first ten were composed prior to 1901. Yet, as several articles in this issue show, he continued in his later plays to revisit and argue over various Victorian preoccupations, from slum sanitation to medical professionalization to the gendered separate spheres, well into the twentieth century. Hence, paradoxically, his writings document both a rejection and a preserving of Victorian ideas. Shaw's career and public persona in many ways took shape in opposition to Victorian norms and constraints; nevertheless, these ideas, like the stern, staid Queen who served as their visible incarnation, continued to fascinate him well into the new century, so that in 1919, as an established and aging playwright, he would unapologetically declare himself "an old Victorian."5The articles in this issue, with topics ranging from literature and stage performance to urban sanitation, explore the ways in which the Victorian era—its ideas, literature, people, and historical developments—contributed to Shaw's life and work. They also show the role Shaw and his works have played in the formation, evolution, and continuation of some facets of Victorian life and culture, and in later generations' perceptions of what it means to be "Victorian."Ellen Dolgin helps to orient readers to the social scene of late-nineteenth-century London, in which Shaw came of age and launched his career. In "Loosening the Stays," she describes many of the challenges that shook the established hierarchies during these years, especially with the increasing upward mobility of women and the working classes. She likewise enumerates the ways in which Shaw and some of his fellow-dramatists illustrated and supported these trends through their plays in the 1890s, especially in plays that blurred the boundaries between the "Fallen Woman" and the "New Woman."Jean Reynolds, James Armstrong, and Mary Christian examine Shaw's echoes of prominent tropes, themes, and plot devices from Victorian literature and drama, both from the melodramas of Sydney Grundy and from such iconic novelists as Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot.Taeko Sakai draws attention to Shaw's involvement in local government and urban development, especially in sanitation and water supply, in London in the 1880s and '90s. As a Fabian and a St. Pancras vestryman, Sakai argues, Shaw gained a familiarity with London slum living conditions that would inform several of his plays, especially Pygmalion, with its repeated comparisons between upper-class hygiene and working-class filth.Finally, Chris Wixson considers the ways in which Shaw both critiqued and reaffirmed nineteenth-century ideas of domestic femininity in Candida. Focusing on two twentieth-century performances of the play, one by Katharine Cornell and one by Peggy Wood, Wixson shows how these performances, along with their critical receptions, illustrate audiences' evolving visions both of Victorian values and of Shaw.Perhaps the central takeaway from these essays is a point Reynolds makes: in asking the question, "Was Shaw a Victorian?" we have to ask another question: "What were the Victorians up to?" In asking this question, and seeking answers in so many directions, the authors of these articles illuminate the complex blend of tradition and iconoclasm, of innovation and reaction, from which Shaw emerged. They also illustrate more generally some of the many ways in which earlier eras shape later ones, and how later generations, whether they venerate the past or ridicule it, preserve those earlier eras in the collective memory.I am grateful to the authors in this volume for their thoughtful contributions to this conversation. My thanks also to Astrid Meyer, Leah Noel, and most especially Chris Wixson for their patient assistance in navigating the PSUP online system and the editorial process.