George Bernard Shaw’s thoughts on sex and Shakespeare to be sold

Back in the 1940s, when American publishers Dodd, Mead & Co wrote to Irish playwright and polemicist George Bernard Shaw, proposing an edition of his collected letters, he said, “There are billions of them ... not until my death can any collection be described as complete”.

Shaw continued to write and in 1949, at almost 93 years old, he was still producing letters almost daily.

An archive of correspondence between the playwright and UK-based American journalist Charles Hayden Church (1878-1956), which includes interview notes, and other material relating to Shaw, assembled by Church, will go under the hammer at Bonham’s Fine Books and Manuscripts sale in London on Wednesday, June 21st with an estimate of £8,000-£12,000 (€9,280-€13,921).

According to catalogue notes, Church was one of Shaw’s favourite interviewers, and the pair corresponded for more than two decades.

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Never one to avoid controversy, the papers deal with Shaw’s thoughts on reforming the alphabet, sex education in schools and equality for women, along with trickier issues such as eugenics and postwar partition of Palestine.

He was ahead of his time, and a century ago was an advocate for women’s independence: “A woman’s right to motherhood should not be conditional on her taking on a husband”.

These sentiments must have shaken to the core the interlinked stronghold that was church and state at the time. He was also a vegetarian, lived a healthy life, and held the unfashionable belief at the time that cremation was a better solution than burial.

While he may have been forward-thinking in some aspects, his belief that “sex should not be discussed with children, either by parents or schoolteachers”, might have something to do with the fact that he lived with his mother until the tender age of almost 42, when he married heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a member of the Fabian Society.

“He was not above losing his temper”, according to catalogue notes that go on to explain snippets in interviews, which were often conducted by post. In a retort to Church: “Your last three questions would take three years to answer. The obvious reply is ‘Read my books’”.

A writer of more than 60 plays, and Nobel recipient for literature in 1925, Shaw was also a political activist who opposed vaccination and organised religion. He has been regularly rated among English-speaking dramatists as second only to Shakespeare, and the word Shavian – now part of the English lexicon – is used to describe something as being in the manner of George Bernard Shaw.

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“It is clear from the memos and postcards instructing Church on where best to place his interviews for maximum return that Shaw had an astute business brain,” says Matthew Haley, head of books and manuscripts at Bonhams.

One of the largest collections on the playwright is held at the Harry Ransom Centre, the humanities research centre at the University of Texas in Austin. Eighty boxes, occupying 10.4 metres (33.3 linear feet), were included in the purchase of T.E. Hanley’s collection of art and literature. Hanley was purported to have the largest private collection of Shaw’s work. bonhams.com, hrc.utexas.edu