LIZA [rising and squaring herself determinedly]: He’s off his chump, he is. I don’t want no balmies teaching me.
(Eliza Doolittle’s very reasonable reaction to Henry Higgins’s impulsive suggestion that he become her tutor, Pygmalion, Act 2)
Pygmalion is by far George Bernard Shaw’s most famous play, turned into a British film in 1938, into the Broadway musical ‘My Fair Lady’ in 1956, and then into the multi-Oscar winning movie of the musical, starring Audrey Hepburn, in 1964.
It exists in two versions, the original 1914 version and a 1941 version to which Shaw added several sequences in light of helping write the screenplay for the 1938 movie. Having ground my way through his earlier plays, I hadn’t expected it to be quite so brilliantly funny as it is. It’s a comic masterpiece and I was surprised how little needed to be changed to turn it into the musical.
Act 1. The portico of St Paul’s church, Covent Garden
A random cross-section of Londoners take shelter from a sudden downpour of rain. It starts out with dialogue between a middle-class mother and her disapproving daughter, Clara, who demand that their wet harassed son, Freddy, finds them a cab. There arrives a Cockney flower seller who tries to hawk her flowers to all the shelterers-from-the-rain.
One of the crowd points out that there’s a bloke here taking notes of everything in a notebook, maybe he’s a copper’s nark. The flowerseller becomes alarmed and protests she wasn’t doing anything wrong in strident Cockney tones. Once drawn to everyone’s attention the note taker, obviously a man of education, amuses himself and entertains the crowd by saying precisely whereabouts in London the flowerseller, the mother and daughter, and other members of the crowd are from.
There’s another gentleman among the crowd, and he politely asks the note taker how he is able to locate people so accurately.
THE NOTE TAKER: Simply phonetics. The science of speech. That’s my profession; also my hobby. Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby! You can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue. I can place any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.
He goes on to explain to the Gentleman that he makes quite a good living giving elocution lessons. And while the flowerseller moans that he’s out to get her, the note taker makes the bet which is the core of the story:
THE NOTE TAKER: You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party. I could even get her a place as lady’s maid or shop assistant, which requires better English. That’s the sort of thing I do for commercial millionaires. And on the profits of it I do genuine scientific work in phonetics…
At which point the two posh men introduce themselves. The note taker introduces himself as Henry Higgins, author of Higgins’s Universal Alphabet, and the gentleman is none other than Colonel Pickering, author of Spoken Sanscrit, who’s come all the way from India to meet Higgins. They agree to go off to Pickering’s hotel, the Carlton, for dinner and further conversation.
All through this the flowergirl has continued to pester them, although Pickering insists he really has no change to give her. Higgins is just as dismissive, so dismissive that in a strop, the flowergirl flings her entire basket of flowers at his feet. The church bell chimes and, realising how uncharitable he’s being, Higgins tosses into it all the change he had in his pocket, before the two gentlemen exit to dinner.
The 1941 version adds a scene where we follow the flowergirl getting a cab to Angel Court, Drury Lane, and follow her up to her squalid room, an epitome of real poverty, where she counts the money Higgins tossed her with glee, before getting into bed.
Act 2. Higgins’s laboratory in his flat in Wimpole Street
Higgins has just finished giving Colonel Pickering a comprehensive tour of his recording and transcription devices, when his housekeeper, Mrs Pearce, announces the arrival of the flowerseller. She enters dressed up to the nines and announces she heard Higgins talking about elocution lessons the night before, and she wants some. For the first time she tells us her name, Eliza Dolittle.
Amid four-way banter between resentful Eliza, scornful Mrs Pearce, brutal Higgins and courteous Colonel, the latter says he’ll pay the costs of all her lessons if Higgins can train her so well that she passes for a lady at the ambassador’s forthcoming party and Higgins accepts the bet:
HIGGINS [becoming excited as the idea grows on him]: What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day. I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe.
So Higgins says he’ll start the experiment straightaway and orders Mrs Pearce to take Eliza to the bathroom, strip her, throw away her filthy clothes, give her a thorough wash and order some proper clothes from Whiteleys, despite Eliza’s protestations at being treated like an object. Most of the comedy derives from how brutally direct Higgins is.
PICKERING [in good-humored remonstrance]: Does it occur to you, Higgins, that the girl has some feelings?
HIGGINS [looking critically at her]: Oh no, I don’t think so. Not any feelings that we need bother about. [Cheerily] Have you, Eliza?
Or his wonderful devil-may-care insouciance.
PICKERING: Excuse me, Higgins; but I really must interfere. Mrs. Pearce is quite right. If this girl is to put herself in your hands for six months for an experiment in teaching, she must understand thoroughly what she’s doing.
HIGGINS: How can she? She’s incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?
So the plan is agreed that Eliza will come and live with Higgins, be supervised by Mrs Pearce and taught not only how to speak, but how to behave, like a gentlewoman.
The bathroom scene (added in 1941) where Mrs Pearce takes Eliza up to the spare room which will be hers and introduces her to a bath, which she has never seen before. ‘I dursn’t. It’s not natural; it would kill me. I’ve never had a bath in my life.’
Meanwhile, Pickering is seriously asking whether Higgins is a gentleman when it comes to women. Higgins boisterously assures him that he detests women and the undermining influence they have. He is a confirmed old bachelor.
Mrs Pearce enters (with Eliza’s lice-infested hat) and sternly asks Professor Higgins not to swear in front of Eliza. He loftily insists that he never swears but Mrs Pearce is not to be brow-beaten. She goes on to ask him to mind his manners more, particularly his table manners, to which Higgins reacts with angry scorn until she lists his bad table manners. Pickering is greatly tickled by all this and it is all quite brilliant comedy.
An extra layer of comedy comes from the way Higgins, with his excitable enthusiasms and blunt rude manner, sees himself as the soul of amiability and politeness; from his lack of self awareness.
No sooner is this scene concluded than Mrs Pearce re-enters to announce the arrival of Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle. This also is brilliantly comedic because, rather than waiting to hear what Alfred has to say, Higgins launches straight in on a ferocious attack, accusing Alfred of a plan and ruse to send his daughter to his house then accuse him of abducting her. It is nothing short of blackmail, he says he’s going to phone the police, goes to the table and picks up the telephone receiver.
As you can imagine, Alfred Doolittle loses all the self righteousness he came with and is thrown on the defensive, explaining that he hadn’t heard from Eliza for two months till he bumped into a ‘boy’ Eliza took in the cab to Higgins’s house for a jaunt. When she learned she was going to stay, she sent the boy back to fetch her stuff from her rooms. Alfred bumped into this boy in the pub and learned about his daughter moving in with a gentleman and he’s come to see what it’s all about.
Higgins, in his aggressive style, tells Alfred he can take Eliza back, now, right now, and rings for Mrs Pearce and tells her to hand the girl over to her father. Mrs Pearce protests she has no clothes since she burned the old ones as requested. In his usual style, Higgins doesn’t care, her father can carry her naked through the streets of London for all he cares.
Alfred protests and asks to talk man to man (so Mrs Pearce discreetly leaves). Alfred tells Higgins he can have his daughter for £5. When Pickering delicately points out that Higgins is not installing Eliza as a mistress, Alfred righteously says of course not; if he thought that was the case, he’d ask for £50! Which made me laugh out loud.
When Pickering and Higgins are revolted by this venality Doolittle gives a droll speech about being one of the ‘undeserving poor’:
DOOLITTLE: Undeserving poverty is my line…I’m undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that’s the truth.
And humorously explains he has just as much right to the basics of life and a bit of a laugh as what the (hypocritical) middle classes call the ‘deserving’ poor.
DOOLITTLE: What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.
Higgins is so impressed by the man’s blarney that he gives him a fiver. As he opens the door to leave he nearly bumps into a vision of beauty dressed in a kimono. He doesn’t recognise his own daughter, and Higgins and Pickering are just as astounded. They have a bit of repartee, then he leaves.
Eliza gives her impressions of having a bath, and putting on clean clothes, expresses her horror at seeing a mirror, then it’s announced that the new clothes have been delivered and she and Mrs Pearce exit. This really ought to be the end of this long act but Shaw, prolix as ever, added a further scene as an example of the kind of lessons Higgins set about giving Eliza.
Which allows Shaw to jump past months and months of similarly painful elocution lessons, to the eve of her first presentation in polite society.
Act 3. The drawing room of Henry’s mother, Mrs Higgins
Which Shaw, as usual, describes in pedantic detail, describing the William Morris furniture and curtains and the precise style of the paintings on the walls. There is absolutely nothing over which Shaw is not a finicky precisionist.
Enter Higgins in a flushed hurry as always. Mrs H is horrified and tells him to go home, reminding him that he offends all her friends but Henry refuses to take no for an answer. He’s invited Eliza to the ‘at home’ and is nervous how she’ll perform.
By one of those wild coincidences which is allowed in comic novels or plays (in fact adds to the comic mood) Mrs Higgins’s guests are the very same family we met fussing about getting a cab in the rain in Act 1, namely Mrs Eynsford Hill, her son Frederick and daughter Clara.
Enter a transformed Eliza who looks and speaks brilliantly in front of pukka guests who, however, all have a nagging feeling that they’ve met her before though they can’t remember where (which plays up the irony of Eliza being the common flower girl they were all trying to avoid in the first act).
Eliza impresses until, that is, she starts telling a long story about her aunt who she thinks was ‘done in’ and Henry’s work quickly unravels, very amusingly. But not before the posh daughter of the guests (Clara) is delighted by what she takes to be the latest racy slang and the posh son (Frederick) falls in love at first sight.
Higgins signals to Eliza that it’s time for her to leave and the Eynsford Hills get up to leave, also. Once alone with her son, Mrs Higgins is cross with him and Pickering for not having considered what will happen to Eliza after their experiment is concluded. She will have become too highfalutin’ to return to her career as a flower seller but have no money to support the position in society her new accent requires. Neither Pickering or Higgins had given this a second’s thought which is why she calls them ‘a pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll’ and ‘ two infinitely stupid male creatures’.
Act 4. Higgins’s rooms
A few months later Pickering and Higgins return late at night from a series of special engagements where Eliza passed herself as an upper class woman. Pickering congratulates Higgins and agrees to pay the wager (the cost of Eliza’s course of elocution lessons, and her outfits). Neither of them pay any attention to Eliza who has a fit and throws his slippers at self-obsessed, rude, bullying Higgins.
LIZA: I’d like to kill you, you selfish brute. Why didn’t you leave me where you picked me out of – in the gutter? You thank God it’s all over, and that now you can throw me back again there, do you?… What am I fit for? What have you left me fit for? Where am I to go? What am I to do? What’s to become of me?… Now you’ve made a lady of me I’m not fit to sell anything else. I wish you’d left me where you found me.
She takes off the fine jewellery she’s wearing and shoves it at him, and takes off the ring she’s wearing and flings it at him and tauntingly asks how much of what she’s wearing is hers since they burned all her clothes when she arrived. Higgins is furious at her attitude and says she can take the whole houseful of clothes for all he cares, tells her to give instructions to Mrs Pearce for his breakfast and exist. Later that night Eliza packs her things and does a bunk.
Act 5. Mrs Higgins’s house
At Mrs Higgins’s house again where Henry and Pickering come to tell her that Eliza’s done a bunk. Mrs H has to explain to her son that neither of them treated Eliza with any respect or gave her any credit for her achievements.
Alfred Doolittle arrives wearing super smart wedding dress due to a wildly improbable sub-plot. Turns out Henry, in correspondence with an American millionaire about devising a universal language, mentioned in passing that Alfred was one of the most remarkable moral philosophers in England today, and so this millionaire left Alfred in his will ‘a share in his Pre-digested Cheese Trust worth three thousand a year on condition that I lecture for his Wannafeller Moral Reform World League as often as they ask me up to six times a year.’
Doolittle laments that the money is going to ruin him – it’s going to make an honest man of him and force him to live by middle-class morality. As an example of middle-class morality he wails that all his relatives, with whom he previously had very little contact, are now getting in touch to sponge off him. He’s dressed up like this because the first requirement of middle-class morality is to get married and so he’s feeling compelled to marry his latest lover, much against both of their wishes.
In the middle of all this Mrs Higgins staggers Henry by revealing that Eliza is upstairs. She came seeking refuge the night before and Mrs Higgins graciously took her in. Mrs Higgins proceeds to lecture Pickering and Henry on how abominably they’ve treated the girl. Henry whines that Eliza threw his slippers at him but Mrs Higgins replied that, if it had been her, she’d have thrown her fire tongs!
Eliza enters acting very self possessed and quite beautiful. She and Mrs Higgins tell Henry a few home truths, starting with how he treated her like an object in an experiment. By contrast her real education in how to be a lady she attributes to Colonel Pickering who treated her with kindness and respect.
Pickering is genuinely fond of Eliza and repeatedly begs her to come back and live with them. Then he, Alfred and Mrs Higgins all go off to the wedding, leaving Eliza and Henry to have a long final scene between them. This is one long argument in which Eliza wails that all she wants is a little respect:
LIZA [much troubled] I want a little kindness. I know I’m a common ignorant girl, and you a book-learned gentleman; but I’m not dirt under your feet.
Henry softens a little, saying he’d quite like her to come back as he’s grown accustomed to her face. But they quickly fall to quarreling and he’s back to calling her an ungrateful idiot and she calling him a cruel tyrant etc.
This could go on all day but is drawn to a conclusion by two things. First, Eliza tells Henry that Freddy Eynsford Hill is in love with her and wants to marry her, which makes Henry burst out in contemptuous laughter.
But what finally breaks the deadlock is when Eliza has a brainwave and declares she could become a teacher of phonetics, just like Henry. In fact Henry had often commented that she had a better ear than him. Yes, she could earn a pretty living. This infuriates Henry who accuses her of ripping off everything he’s taught her but she is delighted that she’s cut through his hard skin and bluster and genuinely scored a point.
LIZA: What a fool I was not to think of it before! You can’t take away the knowledge you gave me. You said I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can. Aha! That’s done you, Henry Higgins, it has. Now I don’t care that [snapping her fingers] for your bullying and your big talk. I’ll advertise it in the papers that your duchess is only a flower girl that you taught, and that she’ll teach anybody to be a duchess just the same in six months for a thousand guineas. Oh, when I think of myself crawling under your feet and being trampled on and called names, when all the time I had only to lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself.
To his own surprise, Henry admits that it is a good idea. Above all it will make her independent instead of a millstone round his neck. Yes, he rather likes her like this, strong and independent. She can come and live with him and Pickering and they can be three bachelors together.
But at this moment Mrs Higgins re-enters to say the carriage has arrived to take them all to Alfred’s wedding and Eliza says, Yes, she’s ready. Patronising to the end, Henry asks Eliza to convey a message to Mrs Pearce about the shopping but Eliza simply replies that she’s passed all this information along already and can’t imagine how he’s going to manage when she leaves, and exits.
Mrs Higgins lingers long enough to tell her son that he has quite literally spoiled the girl but Henry humorously replies that she’s not to worry. Eliza is going to marry dim lovestruck Freddy and at the thought he bursts into hysterical laughter.
THE END.
Shaw’s controlling stage directions
As usual, I am a bit staggered by the minute control Shaw exercises over every aspect of the play. There is no detail of the sets, the costumes of the characters, their every gesture and line of dialogue, which Shaw doesn’t fuss over and dictate. There are the long, detailed and often very opinionated descriptions of each set which open each act. Then there are the countless pieces of dialogue are heavily directed by the stage directions in the text:
HIGGINS [revolted]
DOOLITTLE [unabashed]
HIGGINS [troubled]
DOOLITTLE [with fatherly pride]
MRS. PEARCE [blandly]
HIGGINS [impressively]
DOOLITTLE [evasively]
And so on and so on and so on. And then the notes in the New Mermaid edition by Shaw scholar L.W. Conolly bring this out even more, citing the refinements and additions Shaw made in the 1941 version, as well as countless notes for actors and directors he scribbled in the playbooks used to direct actual productions.
For example, when Higgins threatens Eliza that Mrs Pearce will thrash her with a broomstick, Shaw specifies that at this line, Eliza should grasp the back of a chair in fear (p.40); or correcting the actress playing Mrs Pearce who spoke the line ‘I won’t allow it, It’s you that are wicked’ with anger that, on the contrary, it should be spoken ‘steadily and quietly’ (p.36); or specifying that Eliza should throw the slippers at Higgins with real violence (p.93).
Summary
Act 1: Introducing Henry Higgins the phonologist, Colonel Pickering his fan and Eliza Doolittle the Cockney flower seller, taking shelter from the rain in the portico of St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, with a few other Londoners and a middle-class mother and daughter nagging their (grown-up) son to get them a cab. In explaining who he is, Higgins says he offers lessons in elocution which the stubbornly persistent flower girl overhears.
Act 2: Eliza calls at Higgins’ apartment for lessons and Pickering and Higgins make a bet whether the latter can improve her elocution and manners so completely in 6 months that Eliza can pass for a duchess. To this end she will move in with Higgins and Pickering (and their housekeeper Mrs Pearce), be taught manners and elocution.
Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle, a navvy and dustman, turns up expecting some kind of recompense for having his daughter abducted. Higgins is so ferociously aggressive, accusing Alfred of planning to blackmail the two bachelors, that Alfred is thrown right back on the defensive, but leaves with £5 which is just enough for him and his fancy woman to go on a spree.
Act 3: A few months later Henry brings a transformed Eliza to one of his mother’s ‘at homes’ where she looks and speaks brilliantly in front of pukka guests. Until, that is, she starts telling a long story about her aunt who she thinks was ‘done in’ and Henry’s work quickly unravels. But not before the posh daughter of the guests (Clara) is delighted by what she takes to be the latest racy slang and the posh son (Frederick) falls in love at first sight.
Act 4: A few months later Pickering and Higgins return late at night from a series of special engagements where Eliza passed herself as an upper class woman. Pickering congratulates Higgins and pays up the wager. Neither of them pay any attention to Eliza who has a fit and throws his slippers at self-obsessed, rude, bullying Higgins. Later that night she packs her things and does a bunk.
Act 5: At Mrs Higgins’s house again where Henry and Pickering come to tell her that Eliza’s done a bunk. Mrs H has to explain to her son that neither of them treated Eliza with any respect or gave her any credit for her achievements. Alfred Doolittle arrives wearing smart wedding dress due to the legacy from the American millionaire. Eliza enters and declares she won’t return to their flat and complains about Henry’s bullying insensitive behaviour. A very long argument between the pair ends with Eliza having the brainwave that she could become a teacher of elocution and marry lovestruck Freddy Eynsford Hill and she exits, along with Mrs Higgins, Colonel Pickering and Alfred for the latter’s weeding, leaving Henry helpless with mirth at the thought of his transformed flower seller marrying an upper-class twit.
The preface and sequel
The play has both a preface (5 pages) and what Shaw describes as a ‘Sequel’ (11 pages).
Preface
This is the usual inconsequential ramble. Shaw claims the notation of the English language is a shambles and requires an energetic phonetic expert to revise it. He names various phonetics experts from the 1870s and ’80s before alighting on the figure of English philologist, phonetician and grammarian Henry Sweet. Shaw devotes a page to this stubborn, contrarian character, and the difficulties of the form of shorthand he created which fell victim to the superior marketing strategy of the Pitman system. This is what I mean by ‘rambling’. He claims the University of Oxford never gave Sweet the credit he deserved, then goes on:
I do not blame Oxford, because I think Oxford is quite right in demanding a certain social amenity from its nurslings (heaven knows it is not exorbitant in its requirements!); for although I well know how hard it is for a man of genius with a seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly relations with the men who underrate it, and who keep all the best places for less important subjects which they profess without originality and sometimes without much capacity for them, still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot expect them to heap honours on him.
See how difficult it is to make out what Shaw is on about half the time? Anyway, the point of this windy preface is apparently to point out that Sweet (1845 to 1912) was not Shaw’s model for Henry Higgins, which all seems excessive for an audience who have never heard of Henry Sweet and never thought he was the model for Henry Higgins.
At the end of the preface, with uncharacteristic brevity, Shaw says the play had one simple aim:
If the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among the most important people in England at present, it will serve its turn.
The play’s politics
It is worth stopping to consider this statement for a moment. Shaw was a member of the Fabian Society which believed sweeping reform of British society was necessary to achieve greater equality, but that it should be constitutional, parliamentary reform, not violent revolution.
Because of ‘My Fair Lady’ it’s tempting to see the play as simply a brilliant entertainment. But seen through Shaw’s Fabian prism, he is attacking, not the economic basis of British class structure but one of its most powerful symptoms or markers, snobbery about speech. All the modern debates about whether Eliza and Henry love each other, whether Higgins is a closet gay, whether Eliza becomes a strong independent feminist or remains the doll of two old misogynists – it is easy to forget the genuinely revolutionary intent of the play’s thesis: how we speak determines how we are perceived in society, society’s revolting inequalities are there for everyone to see in Britain’s howling snobbery about our accents and dialects, and it’s from this socialist perspective that Shaw says the phoneticians ‘are among the most important people in England at present’. So Pygmalion is very much an issue play but it’s worth trying to get back behind the feminist interpretations which now dominate discussion of the play, closer to Shaw’s original intent of attacking one of the bastions of Britain’s radically unequal and repressive society.
On a practical front, do you think anyone who saw the musical or watches the movie ‘My Fair Lady’ has ever been educated into realising there was a caste of men called the phoneticians and that they were ‘among the most important people in England at present’? No. Me neither. Authors, like artists, often have a grossly exaggerated sense of their impact on society which, by and large, is pretty close to zero.
The sequel (1916)
Shaw was furious when the actors in the British premiere of the play changed the scene to imply that Higgins and Eliza were on the verge of falling in love. Indeed this wish to have the lead protagonists end their bickering with a lovely romance has plagued interpretations and is the ending enshrined in the 1938 movie, the Broadway musical and Hollywood movie versions.
Shaw bitterly regretted describing the play as ‘A romance in five acts’ and ended up writing this ‘Sequel’ to try and clarify matters. For a start he says he called it a romance not in the sense that the hero and heroine get married at the end (they don’t) but simply because the transfiguration in Eliza seems fantastical, like something from an ancient myth of medieval legend.
You’d have thought this would be a simple point to make but somehow Shaw launches into a farrago of twaddle about why some men and women marry and others remain unmarried, a windy discourse unenlightened by any contact with Freud or any form of psychology, sociology, feminism or any school of thought except Shaw’s egregious satisfaction with his own genius and intolerable fondness for the sound of his own voice. If you think I’m being unfair, here’s an example:
When we look round and see that hardly anyone is too ugly or disagreeable to find a wife or a husband if he or she wants one, whilst many old maids and bachelors are above the average in quality and culture, we cannot help suspecting that the disentanglement of sex from the associations with which it is so commonly confused, a disentanglement which persons of genius achieve by sheer intellectual analysis, is sometimes produced or aided by parental fascination.
As with the preface, this is 1) quite hard to understand – taking several readings to comprehend its full intent – at which point 2) you realise it’s useless.
But after a few pages like this Shaw gets round to the point he wants to make which is that: Henry Higgins for not, repeat not marry Eliza. Eliza marries Freddy. That’s the point the Sequel exists to make, emphasise and ram home, contrary to all producers, adapters and screenwriters who wanted Higgins and Eliza to end up an item.
Shaw goes on to elaborate on the young couple’s fortunes. They are poor because Freddy has no education and no prospects. The Colonel gives them £500 but this eventually runs out. Alfred refuses to subsidise his daughter because he has become a social success in the highest circles (dining with dukes) and this turns out to be very expensive, soaking up his £4,000 a year.
So Eliza asks if she can move in with the Wimpole Street bachelors and they agree, bringing Freddy, too. Henry objects to her teaching phonetics so she gives that up. Instead she recurs to the suggestion that she’d floated during the play of opening a flowershop and this is exactly what she and Freddy do, at South Kensington tube station. I go through there regularly to exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This fictional nugget has changed my view of that busy tube station forever; I’ll imagine Eliza there bustling over her buttonholes.
For some reason the Sequel contains a lengthy digression about the fate of Clara Eynsford Hill, Freddy’s sister, who Shaw seems much more concerned with than Eliza. She is a snobbish failure whose eyes are opened by the novels of H.G. Wells (who was, of course, a friend of Shaw’s). These (I think) make her see her life and values are all wrong but also make her determined to meet her hero which she finally does, for half an hour at a garden party, remaining dazzled for weeks afterwards. She happens to mention all this to the owner of a furniture shop who is also a ‘Wellsian’ who promptly hires Clara in the hope that she will attract Wells to the shop and effect a meeting. It is on this whimsical basis that Clara gets a job. It causes an almighty row with her mother who hoped her children would be above ‘trade’ but it means that the battle of trade has already been fought when a few weeks later Freddy shows up to tell mother he’s opening a flower shop with Eliza, and Mrs Eynsford Hill just gives up. The real puzzle about all this rambling digression is why on earth Shaw felt it necessary to drag his friend Wells into this farrago and include a physical description of him at the garden party where Clara meets him?
She had made up her mind that, cost what it might, she would see Mr. Wells in the flesh; and she had achieved her end at a garden party. She had better luck than so rash an enterprise deserved. Mr. Wells came up to her expectations. Age had not withered him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety in half an hour. His pleasant neatness and compactness, his small hands and feet, his teeming ready brain, his unaffected accessibility, and a certain fine apprehensiveness which stamped him as susceptible from his topmost hair to his tipmost toe, proved irresistible.
Is this a description written by a friend or an enemy? Either way, why on earth does Shaw give such prominence to his frenemy, placing him at the centre of this odd story?
Anyway, the flower business almost fails, repeatedly bailed out by the Colonel, much to Henry’s howling amusement, until Pickering insists they learn book-keeping to run it properly. This involves a course at the London School of Economics and Eliza begging Henry to show her how to write which turned into an intensive course in fine calligraphy, which led to them spending a fortune on unnecessarily high quality paper.
But meanwhile the business actually began to prosper, especially when they branched out into vegetables (asparagus being particularly profitable). She is a regular at Wimpole Street where she considers the Colonel the father she never had, but she has ferocious fights with Henry, and more than stands her own ground. In fact sometimes the Colonel asks her to be kind to poor Higgins. Sometimes she has fantasies about whisking him away to a desert island and using her wiles to force him to make love to her. But in real life, she likes the Colonel and sturdily dislikes Henry Higgins and that’s how it remains.
Henry Higgins in modern London
Although the play still has currency among the white middle classes who go to the theatre, and the movie appeals to all soft-hearted fans of the radiant Audrey Hepburn, its subject is receding into a historical past, into an ended era.
There are still plenty of chavs and proles who speak as roughly as Eliza but London, where the play is set, is now a staggeringly multicultural city. Higgins prides himself on being able to place a Londoner’s birthplace to within a few miles based on their accents. But most Londoners now weren’t born in London, many of them weren’t even born in England, and English isn’t their first language. According to the most recent data, the percentage of Londoners born in London may now be as low as 25%, and as many as 41% of current Londoners were not born in the UK.
In West London out towards Heathrow, a modern-day Higgins would have more grist detecting which part of India a person came from; in south London where I live, he would be challenged to decide which Caribbean island his random Londoners came from. But these are only two groups among the hundreds of nationalities and ethnicities which throng contemporary London. A modern-day Higgins would be just as challenged to determine which bit of Poland or Albania or Somalia or Ukraine or China a modern Londoner originated from.
The play and the movie feel nostalgic because they refer to a London, and an England, which have been abolished.
Credit
‘Pygmalion’ by George Bernard Shaw was first published in 1914. I read it in the 2008 New Mermaid paperback edition, edited with an introduction by L.W. Conolly who is extremely knowledgeable but, alas, American.
Related link
Bernard Shaw reviews
- Arms and the Man (1894)
- Candida (1894)
- John Bull’s Other Island (1904)
- Major Barbara (1905)
- Preface to Major Barbara (1905)
- The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906)
- Pygmalion (1913)
- Heartbreak House (1919)
Books & Boots 