Pygmalion: Act 1

“I’m a respectable girl: so help me, I never spoke to him except to ask him to buy a flower.”

On a church portico in London’s theatre district, people shelter from the rain. Identified by titles rather than
names, it’s clear the weather has forced people of different social classes together. Among these people are a
gentleman, a note-taker, and a flower-girl, who is jostled by a young man causing her to shout after him in a
strong Cockney accent. She piques the note-taker’s attention, and some confusion ensues when the crowd
believe he is a police informer gathering evidence against her. To calm the crowd, the note-taker demonstrates
his linguistic skills. For he is none other than Henry Higgins, linguist, and phonetician. He brags to the
gentleman that he can pass someone like the Flower-girl off as a duchess at a high class gathering. Soon after,
the weather clears and the crowd disperse.

Knowledge Check
Try to answer these questions from memory:

6. What is ‘phonetics’?
1. Outside which church is Act 1 set? (a) A type of geography study
(a) St Martin (b) A discipline in physics
(b) St Paul (c) A scientific approach to poetry
(c) St Steven (d) The science of speech
(d) St Vedast
7. What does the note taker NOT call the
2. How old is Freddy? flower girl?
(a) Sixteen (a) A bilious pigeon
(b) Eighteen (b) A squashed cabbage leaf
(c) Twenty (c) Almost pernicious woman
(d) Forty (d) Incarnate insult to the English language

3. Why does the flower girl know Freddy’s 8. Where has the gentleman recently come
name? from?
(a) A lucky guess (a) China
(b) They are old school friends (b) India
(c) They are secretly dating (c) Argentina
(d) ‘Freddy’ is slang for any young man (d) Canada

4. How much does the gentleman give the 9. Where does the flower girl really live?
flower girl? (a) Buckingham Palace
(a) Tuppence (b) Wimpole Street
(b) Three hapence (c) Park Lane
(c) A shilling (d) Angel Court
(d) A crown
10. Which of these is NOT in the flower girl’s
5. Where was the flower girl born? home?
(a) Lisson Grove (a) A cracked bathtub
(b) Hammersmith (b) An empty birdcage
(c) Buckingham Palace (c) An American alarm clock
(d) Hoxton (d) Gas lamp
 Understanding and Interpretation
1. Freddy, Clara, and their mother are an upper-class family. How does Shaw portray them? Does
anything strike or surprise you about the way they speak and act?

2. Both the note-taker and Eliza are identified by their clothing. Can you find lines describing items of
clothing and comment on why Shaw is drawing attention to the clothes people wear?

3. Look at the way various characters speak to (and about) the flower girl. Do these lines reveal any
prejudices that the lower classes had to face?

4. What does the note-taker believe about language and class. In what way might the note-taker echo
George Bernard Shaw’s own beliefs?

5. What does the interaction between Liza and the taxi driver reveal about class? In what way is the taxi a
symbol of class distinction?
 Historical Context: A Society in Flux

“It’s aw rawt: e’s a gentleman: look at his be-oots.”

In Pygmalion, we observe a divided society, separated by language, education, and wealth. George
Bernard Shaw wrote his play in 1913, a time when new political ideas and reforms were circulating
throughout the world. For example, the push for suffrage (equal voting rights for women) and other
equal rights for women was approaching its climax (in the United States, women were given the vote
in 1921, in England this right was won in 1928). Shaw was also a prominent Fabian, a branch of
socialism that he helped to found in 1884. The Fabian Society still exists in England today and
continues to work for socialist principles such as the commitment to non-violent reform, equality for
all, and the importance of political education in transforming society. As an articulate non-
conformist thinker, Shaw believed in a facet of the human spirit he called the ‘Life Force’ that, if
harnessed by individuals and collectively in society, would eventually help improve the world.

Industrialization throughout the nineteenth century had a tremendous impact on the organisation of
British society, which was traditionally a class hierarchy; a pyramid of ranks and degrees of status
built on historical land ownership. Industrialisation changed all this as it allowed for the growth of
the middle class, elevating people who had money (not land). This mobility was unevenly
distributed, however. The lower classes, many of whom came from agricultural settings to cities
seeking jobs in new factories, were largely at the mercy of employers and inner-city poverty. Slum
conditions, disease, low wages, limited workers’ rights were all facts of life for the working class. The
poorest of the poor were often forced into workhouses, which differed from prisons only in name;
these harsh places were degrading and unpleasant and the fear of ending up in the workhouse was
real for the poorest members of society.

The long reign of Queen Victoria had given British society a stability and coherence through a set of
values now called ‘Victorianism’. They revolved around high minded ideals such as charity, national
service, domesticity (for women and children, at least, who should stay at home and be ‘seen but
not heard’). However, her death in 1901 coincided with peak industrialisation to challenge many of
these traditional values. The Great War that began in 1914 – the year of Pygmalion’s London
premiere – constituted the most intense physical and psychological assault on Britain’s sense of
national identity and symbolised the most dramatic break with Victorian values. The play suggests
the deterioration of many pre-industrial values and depicts a rapidly-changing society in flux so we
can better understand the problems that occur in this ‘age of upstarts’.

You can research some of these issues online or by reading the articles on the class blog in the
section for Act One:

• The Industrial Revolution

• Women’s rights and suffrage
• The British Class System
• Victorianism
• The Fabian Society
Activity

One of Shaw’s intentions at the opening of his play was to depict this ‘society in flux’. Characters
from different social classes, backgrounds, and walks of life rub shoulders with one another, and even
characters from the same class are divided in outlook and opinion. How does the opening scene help
Shaw achieve this depiction of a fragmented society? Complete this table with ideas from the play,
and short explanations:

Example / Methodology Explanation / Analysis

Shaw writes the flower girl’s voice phonetically. He even uses
a back-to-front letter e (called a schwa) to represent a short
The flower girl’s dialect: vowel sound. He runs several words together, such as ‘better
than’ (bettern) and ‘by as him’ (bawmz). Through this type of
“Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, non-standard language, Shaw represents the flower girl’s
fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawnz a lower-class upbringing. However, he no doubt want us to
mather should, eed now bettern to hear the irony that she comments on the poor behaviour of
spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn then
the upper-class – Freddy acts without manners even though
ran awy athaht pyin.”
he’s meant to be a gentleman!
 Discussion Point: Language and Dialect

“A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere –
no right to live.”

A dialect is a particular version of a language spoken by

people in a particular place or social group. Some dialects
use nonstandard grammar and widely varying
pronunciation. The cosmopolitan nature of the London
setting is difficult to miss in Act One. Characters speak in a
variety of different ways, revealing a complex and multi-
layered society. Shaw is scrupulous in the way he
encourages actors playing the main and supporting
characters in this scene to speak in a particular way. He
wants their words and use of language to reveal
something about their identities, social status, attitudes,
and political opinions.

How are dialects presented in the play? Is Liza’s Cockney

dialect presented as something desirable or undesirable?
What does Higgins think of her dialect? What do you think
Wendy Hiller plays Liza Doolittle in the 1938 film Shaw believes? Should dialects be valued as important
adaptation of Pygmalion features of a person’s (or community’s) culture? Or should
people learn how to speak in standard English?

Bernard Shaw on… Language

“In the dialogue an e upside down indicates the indefinite vowel, sometimes called obscure
or neutral, for which, though it is one of the commonest sounds in English speech, our
wretched alphabet has no letter.”

Throughout his life, Shaw tried to change the spelling system of the English language. English is
supposed to be a phonetic language, but often the spelling of words does not represent the way they
are pronounced. He famously gave the example of the word ‘fish’ which can be spelled ‘ghoti’” GH
from the word ‘laugh’, O from ‘women’ and TI from the word ‘nation.’ He spent much of his own
money promoting a phonetic alphabet and alternative spelling system to solve these problems. In his
will, Shaw left money to a society for the development of a new spelling system containing forty-two
letters. At the beginning of Pygmalion, he briefly uses this system to write the words of Liza Doolittle
and eagle-eyed readers will already have noticed that his script contains few apostrophes, which he
finds redundant and unnecessary.

Activity

Read the Preface to Pygmalion to further understand Shaw’s ideas about language, spelling, and the
art of the theatre. Can you summarise Shaw’s beliefs about these things in three simple sentences?