LAUSR

These two books make notable contributions to the recently inaugurated series on “Bernard Shaw and his Contemporaries” published by Palgrave Macmillan. This should come as no surprise since the two authors, Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel and Peter Gahan, co-editors of the series, are both leading Shaw scholars. Their books are beautifully written and carefully researched; and display a rare and welcome commitment to social progress. Interestingly, they both focus primarily on the non-fictional prose writings of Bernard Shaw, the articles, lengthy letters, public speeches and criticism that form a large and important part of his extraordinary textual production. The plays, though secondary, are not absent, however, and careful connections are made between Shaw’s ventilation of his social themes in both his journalism and his drama. In this regard, these two important books parallel and superbly complement one another. The emphasis in Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel’s book is on Shaw’s crusading journalism from the 1880s to the First World War. Journalism allowed Shaw the most immediate of responses to the social conditions of the time. The book brilliantly organises its approach around four of the biggest news stories imaginable: the horrific Whitechapel murders of the 1880s, the hounding of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1890, the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and the outbreak of the First World War two years later. The first of these coincides with and is in part prompted by the rise of the New Journalism, championed by W.T. Stead in his newspaper, The Pall Mall Gazette. Shaw, and the book, are deeply ambivalent about the figure of Stead. On the one hand, Stead promotes an innovative kind of journalism, one which uses news stories to raise and discuss important social issues. On the other hand, the new journalism was frequently sensational, serving its readers an ever more explicit diet of sex and violence and working up an emotive, populist approach to its subjects. Shaw welcomed and