George Bernard Shaw and his Writing Hut: Privacy and Publicity as Performance at Shaw's Corner

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 1906 George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) and his wife Charlotte moved to an Arts and Crafts house set in two acres of beautiful gardens in the countryside in Hertfordshire. Despite its potential as a refuge from city living, a place of comfort and quiet domesticity away from their London flat, Shaw denied the possibility of habitation in any conventional sense, preferring to exist on the margins. Indeed he acted as if no boundaries existed between the interiors and landscapes that surrounded the house, typically occupying the liminal zones of window sills and verandas. This article will argue that the locus of this fluidity and theatrical imagination was a writing hut in the form of a revolving shelter, built in a secluded part of the garden, hidden from view. Equipped with a bed and a writing table, Shaw fashioned an outside study as an intermediate space. A site for the performance of the self and an advertisement for his socialist ideas, it was particularly constructive in the promotion of health reform. He ensured that his hut gained notoriety worldwide through the mass media in the form of journal articles and photographs, against the backdrop of his own burgeoning interest in photography and the media. Through the Habermasian theory of “audience-oriented subjectivity” and the ideas of architectural historian Beatriz Colomina, Shaw is considered in ways that have not previously been recognized: anticipating the concerns of modern architecture and Modernism, dematerializing boundaries between inside and outside, between privacy and publicity.