Details
SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD. Autograph letter signed ("G. Bernard Shaw") to "Dear Bert," London, 15 December 1899. 3 pages, 8vo, on pale gray paper, some fold splits (one across a few words, but nothing missing).
ADVICE TO A YOUNG MAN
"...When I was fifteen, I did what everybody will tell you was the manly, right, independent thing to do: that is, I went into an office to spare the family finances and support myself by my own exertions. Result, a waste of four or five years...When at last I gave up this dutiful tomfoolery, and plunged into London, it took me nine years of preying on my mother & father and anybody else who, like your father, would stand me a dinner or a stall at a boxing competition, before I got my legs as a journalist. Those nine years were my apprenticeship: I did a lot of work in them -- wrote five novels and dozens of articles, lectured & ranted, and picked up all sorts of efficiencies; but I had no gleam of success...I have no doubt whatever that I brought this on myself to a great extent by fooling away my time as a clerk for from 18 to 72 a year in a Dublin office when I should have been equipping myself for serious work, and that my mother had better have taken the worst of it then than later on...Both your mother & your father look enormously better & happier than they ever did when they were comparatively affluent; and after all there is money enough left to make it idiotically false economy to make a clerk of you. If it were a question of apprenticing you as a carpenter or mason, with a view to your becoming an architect & builder, I should heartily approve; but put the city & its dungeons out of your head..."
ADVICE TO A YOUNG MAN
"...When I was fifteen, I did what everybody will tell you was the manly, right, independent thing to do: that is, I went into an office to spare the family finances and support myself by my own exertions. Result, a waste of four or five years...When at last I gave up this dutiful tomfoolery, and plunged into London, it took me nine years of preying on my mother & father and anybody else who, like your father, would stand me a dinner or a stall at a boxing competition, before I got my legs as a journalist. Those nine years were my apprenticeship: I did a lot of work in them -- wrote five novels and dozens of articles, lectured & ranted, and picked up all sorts of efficiencies; but I had no gleam of success...I have no doubt whatever that I brought this on myself to a great extent by fooling away my time as a clerk for from 18 to 72 a year in a Dublin office when I should have been equipping myself for serious work, and that my mother had better have taken the worst of it then than later on...Both your mother & your father look enormously better & happier than they ever did when they were comparatively affluent; and after all there is money enough left to make it idiotically false economy to make a clerk of you. If it were a question of apprenticing you as a carpenter or mason, with a view to your becoming an architect & builder, I should heartily approve; but put the city & its dungeons out of your head..."