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Director's Note
Howdy! Thank you for being here.
How does a show like Pygmalion get to be chosen? And how does Upstart Arts work behind the scenes? I thought it might be interesting to answer both those questions and share some of what makes Upstart Arts a unique collaborative venture.
We have a monthly reading group, last Sunday of every month, reading a play over two months, mostly Shakespeare. But sometimes we range into other parts of the public domain, via suggestions and anonymous polls. We made a collective decision to read Pygmalion over April and May of 2023. And like many of the best plays, so much of it still remains relevent today. George Bernard Shaw's language is sharp, his characters irrepressible, and Alfred Doolittle's lamenting middle class morality still stings. We had a long discussion about independence, marriage, asexuality, amatormativity, women's rights, suffragettes, economic stressors, language. It was obvious to me that my conversation with this play was not finished. So in January, we held auditions and the cast you are viewing tonight assembled.
I am fascinated by the original sources, original language, Shaw and Shakespeare and Molière uncut. When you look at them, you find characters like Clara Eynsford Hill, not seen on the screen in My Fair Lady, but here engaged in a vital conversation with Henry Higgins and her mother about propriety and language, a guide to navigating society as a young women. The varnished Hollywood version made a young woman disappear; George Bernard Shaw and I think we should listen to their voices more. Higgins proudly gives Eliza the tools to be independent, whether he approves of her use of them or not. I have included in the program George Bernard Shaw's very complicated epilogue, where he lays out very specific futures for all of the characters in Pygmalion. It's nothing you'd find on a movie screen. More practicality than romance.
And that's what you'll find here at Upstart, plays you might not have heard about (Oscar Wilde's A Woman Of No Importance -- check out our version) or seen the unaltered, original vision for, Pygmalion being a perfect example for that category. Male playwrights who were feminists before women were allowed a vote; contemporary women, queer, and non binary dramatists adapting classic tales of mystery and horror for a world that acknowledges 2SLGBTQIA lives. We are seeking different voices in classic forms because as Henry Higgins would be the first to tell you, mastering language is mustering power.
Thank you to all of my collaborators and supporters. I would not be doing this without you.
Michelle Denise Norton
Cast
Creative Team
Michelle Denise Norton
Ashar
Gayle Eubank
Kitty Geoghan
About Upstart Arts
Upstart Arts is an all-volunteer theatrical collective based in York, Pennsylvania.
In March 2020, Upstart decided to apply our first rule to the pandemic: Don't hurt the actors. Since then, we have mainly concentrated on online shows and readings, which has given us the opportunity to work with actors from all over the world, including several who started out with us in York and have since moved away.
We have several full-length versions of Shakespearean comedies as well as works by Oscar Wilde and Moliere available on our YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNBdYi5sk6oLqbW1_iub3yA.
We also have a podcast series, Twilight Thriller Radio. Some episodes reimagine the Sherlock Holmes tales as a true-crime podcast, while others do a fresh take on Poe and Doyle. Some videos for that are on our YouTube page, and you can find the podcasts on Spotify and at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/upstart-arts-presents/id1538223880.
Upstart Arts is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We are glad to present our productions for free, but we will also gladly accept donations. Check our social media for fundraisers, including the upcoming Give Local York event.
Current and upcoming productions
See all of the Upstart Arts productions of plays in the public domain on our YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNBdYi5sk6oLqbW1_iub3yA.
Listen to Twilight Thriller Radio radio plays and podcasts at https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/upstart-arts or https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/upstart-arts-presents/id1538223880
Coming in July 2024: Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Board of directors: Gayle Eubank, president; Jasmine Graham, vice president; Michelle Denise Norton, secretary
Credits for videos
Credits for Pygmalion videos
Photos
"Covent Garden, London | Canon AE-1 Program" by Nathan O'Nions is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
"[London] Covent Garden" by Un ragazzo chiamato Bi is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
"Covent Garden at night" by pavlinajane is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
"Brompton Road" by The Wolf is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
"London" by Francesca Cappa is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
"Columbia Road Flower Market, London" by jaybergesenis licensed under CC BY 2.0.
"#borough #market #flower #trip #travel #london" by Thiane is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
"London Marylebone Station" by ell brown is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
"Weymouth Street, Marylebone, London w1" by Weymouth Street is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
"twotwentytwo (222), Marylebone, NW1" by Ewan-M is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
"File:Webster Electronic Memory wire recorder (ca. 1948), Gramophone for disk, Edison phonograph for cylinder - MIM Brussels (2015-05-30 by chibicode).jpg" by chibicode is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
"George Bernard Shaw" by IAmSanjeevan is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
"George Bernard Shaw" by plumsaplomb is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.
"Mansion House interior" by Matt From London is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
"Blue Porcelain Room, Fenton House, Hampstead, London" by orangeaurochs is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
"Taxi top sign in London" by outreachr.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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"Orchids in a vase" by Claudiabrauer is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
"#cappellini #colorful #colori #woman #hat #pink #manfrys #photostreet #like4like" by Antonio Manfredonio is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
"Dress wristshot - Marina Militare 1936" by GuySie is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
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"Asymmetrical bracelet - Oscar Heyman and Bros (38866307855)" by Tim Evanson from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, USA is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
"Bandeau by Cartier (38643573085)" by Tim Evanson from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, USA is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
"Collapsible top hat IMGP9692" by Nikodem Nijaki is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
"File:Grey top hat by Scotts Ltd of Old Bond Street, London, with hatbox, 1950.jpg" by Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
"Thick as Thieves Tuxedo" by Kent Wang is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
"Bow tie" by sylvain kalache is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Audio
"Covent Garden - Ambience.wav" by Kalou is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
"Covent_Garden_rain_6.wav" by innov8ting is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
"Covent Garden - Taxi Bike Bells 2.wav" by Kalou is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
"1_gustav_becker_westminster_quarter.wav" by claudius9uk is marked with CC0 1.0.
Team_Saul_Nosthas
Meet the Company
Anna Blaine
Anna Y. Blaine is a writer and actress based in Monmouth County, New Jersey. She always had a passion for writing and storytelling which is why she decided to become a creative artist. While getting her Bachelor’s of Arts in English at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, NJ, she was cast in a musical production of Sweeney Todd. After college, she was a part of an Algonquin Theater production of Guys and Dolls in Manasquan, NJ. Since then she has studied at the prestigious Uta Hagen studio and Roger Hendricks Simon studio in New York City. In 2021, Anna was cast in an Upstart Arts live streamed play production of Squirrel Girl Goes to College. She is thrilled to be featured in another Upstart Arts live streamed play production. Anna is also a novelist, playwright and screenwriter.
Jenson Tavares
Jenson Tavares recently won the Best Actress award at the Screaming Ostrich Film Festival for her performance as Callie in the short film Miles of Summer. She just completed her first supporting role in a feature film and has 5 upcoming film projects. After Pygmalion she will perform in Crossing A Musical Journey touring production! She has had so much fun working with the talented cast and crew of Pygmalion!
Carolyn Stewart
Hailing from both Mexico and Scotland. This is Carolyn's 5th production with Upstart Arts. She is thrilled to be taking part in this year production of Pygmalion. and hopes you'll enjoy the show.
Jonathan Davis
I myself have been acting since elementary school. I have done several local theater projects, done several independent films and do horror acting in the Haunted forests every year. I am delighted to be in this production of Pygmalion as Freddy Eynsford Hill and look forward to many more projects in the future.
Aliona Garcia
Aliona Garcia is a Spanish/British actress splitting time between New York City and Spain. She has appeared in countless virtual productions on film and theatre and has recently appeared in A Sketch of New York at the Producers' Club and The Ballad of Lulu and Dad both in the Secret Theatre and in film. She is also the Executive Director of Tiger's Heart Players and co-founder of EliWay Films.
Joshua R. Pearce
Joshua R. Read is an American-born actor and singer based in Calgary, Canada. He has experience in theatre, opera, jazz, as well as film. Recently Joshua has been seen in such musicals as "Follies" and "Fiddler on the Roof", and he made his film debut in the OWN film "Christmas of Yes." Joshua has a very active digital artistic output. To see more of him, you can follow his Instagram (@joshua.r.read) and his YouTube (@joshua.r.read.bass.baritone).
Priscilla McFerren
Priscilla McFerren (Henry Higgins) became a regular participant in Upstart Arts' Stay-at-Home-Shakespeare in the early days of the pandemic. As such she has had the pleasure of playing countless Shakespeare characters including Marc Antony, King Lear, Bottom, Friar Francis and Prospero. She has also appeared in Twilight Thriller Radio productions from Upstart Arts, presenting a few Conan Doyle villains. She lives in State College, PA, is the retired director of Guthrie Library, Hanover and is currently in rehearsal for the role of Antonio in Class Act Productions' Much Ado About Nothing which will run the first weekend of April 2024 at the Boal Barn Playhouse.
Hilary Appelman
Hilary is delighted to be performing in her second Upstart production, after playing Sherlock Holmes in The Case Of Charles Augustus Milverton. Hilary lives in State College, Pennsylvania, where she recently played Polonius in a local production of Hamlet. Thanks to Michelle for welcoming her into the Upstart family and to Priscilla for being her theater guru, and to the wideflung cast and crew for your talents and camaraderie. "Now sit down and be quiet!"
Stephanie Schwartz
Stephanie Schwartz (Alfred Doolittle) is a NY based actor who has performed throughout the NYC metropolitan area in both established and new plays, live and zoom. As a retired professor of speech and theater education (Iona University) PYGMALION is near and dear to her heart. SAG-AFTRA, http://resumes.actorsaccess.com; http://www.about.me/stephaniefls;
Contact: actorstephanieschwartz@gmail.com.
Gayle Eubank
Gayle is a founder and the president of the board for Upstart and mostly does the techie things involved with the online shows. She is also the managing editor for digital at The York Dispatch. Gayle has been in many, many plays, mostly Shakespeare, and has spent a large portion of the pandemic online with this wonderful collective.
Michelle Denise Norton
Ashar
I’m a 23 year old who has the humor of Deadpool and is a lot like Blade in the sense that I can be out in the daylight even though I don’t prefer it
Gayle Eubank
Gayle really enjoys making the little videos to run between acts!
Kitty Geoghan
Kitty Geoghan is the graphic designer and visual artist for Upstart Arts. They have created designs for Upstart since its inception, as well as portraying Claudio in *Much Ado About Nothing* during 2020's Stay-At-Home Shakespeare. In the TUTT days, she also appeared as Hortensio in *Taming of the Shrew* and Celia in *As You Like It*. Born and raised in York, Kitty has traveled far and wide from Upstart's home base, and is currently in Michigan studying for a PhD in English and Education.
Photos
Deciding Eliza's Future
The Cast
Cast and Crew
Epilogue by George Bernard Shaw
The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories. Now, the history of Eliza Doolittle, though called a romance because of the transfiguration it records seems exceedingly improbable, is common enough. Such transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of resolutely ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne set them the example by playing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which she began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in all directions have assumed, for no other reason than that she became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it. This is unbearable, not only because her little drama, if acted on such a thoughtless assumption, must be spoiled, but because the true sequel is patent to anyone with a sense of human nature in general, and of feminine instinct in particular.
Eliza, in telling Higgins she would not marry him if he asked her, was not coquetting: she was announcing a well-considered decision. When a bachelor interests, and dominates, and teaches, and becomes important to a spinster, as Higgins with Eliza, she always, if she has character enough to be capable of it, considers very seriously indeed whether she will play for becoming that bachelor’s wife, especially if he is so little interested in marriage that a determined and devoted woman might capture him if she set herself resolutely to do it. Her decision will depend a good deal on whether she is really free to choose; and that, again, will depend on her age and income. If she is at the end of her youth, and has no security for her livelihood, she will marry him because she must marry anybody who will provide for her. But at Eliza’s age a good-looking girl does not feel that pressure; she feels free to pick and choose. She is therefore guided by her instinct in the matter. Eliza’s instinct tells her not to marry Higgins. It does not tell her to give him up. It is not in the slightest doubt as to his remaining one of the strongest personal interests in her life. It would be very sorely strained if there was another woman likely to supplant her with him. But as she feels sure of him on that last point, she has no doubt at all as to her course, and would not have any, even if the difference of twenty years in age, which seems so great to youth, did not exist between them.
As our own instincts are not appealed to by her conclusion, let us see whether we cannot discover some reason in it. When Higgins excused his indifference to young women on the ground that they had an irresistible rival in his mother, he gave the clue to his inveterate old-bachelordom. The case is uncommon only to the extent that remarkable mothers are uncommon. If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses. This makes him a standing puzzle to the huge number of uncultivated people who have been brought up in tasteless homes by commonplace or disagreeable parents, and to whom, consequently, literature, painting, sculpture, music, and affectionate personal relations come as modes of sex if they come at all. The word passion means nothing else to them; and that Higgins could have a passion for phonetics and idealize his mother instead of Eliza, would seem to them absurd and unnatural. Nevertheless, 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.
Now, though Eliza was incapable of thus explaining to herself Higgins’s formidable powers of resistance to the charm that prostrated Freddy at the first glance, she was instinctively aware that she could never obtain a complete grip of him, or come between him and his mother (the first necessity of the married woman). To put it shortly, she knew that for some mysterious reason he had not the makings of a married man in him, according to her conception of a husband as one to whom she would be his nearest and fondest and warmest interest. Even had there been no mother-rival, she would still have refused to accept an interest in herself that was secondary to philosophic interests. Had Mrs. Higgins died, there would still have been Milton and the Universal Alphabet. Landor’s remark that to those who have the greatest power of loving, love is a secondary affair, would not have recommended Landor to Eliza. Put that along with her resentment of Higgins’s domineering superiority, and her mistrust of his coaxing cleverness in getting round her and evading her wrath when he had gone too far with his impetuous bullying, and you will see that Eliza’s instinct had good grounds for warning her not to marry her Pygmalion.
And now, whom did Eliza marry? For if Higgins was a predestinate old bachelor, she was most certainly not a predestinate old maid. Well, that can be told very shortly to those who have not guessed it from the indications she has herself given them.
Almost immediately after Eliza is stung into proclaiming her considered determination not to marry Higgins, she mentions the fact that young Mr. Frederick Eynsford Hill is pouring out his love for her daily through the post. Now Freddy is young, practically twenty years younger than Higgins: he is a gentleman (or, as Eliza would qualify him, a toff), and speaks like one; he is nicely dressed, is treated by the Colonel as an equal, loves her unaffectedly, and is not her master, nor ever likely to dominate her in spite of his advantage of social standing. Eliza has no use for the foolish romantic tradition that all women love to be mastered, if not actually bullied and beaten. “When you go to women,” says Nietzsche, “take your whip with you.” Sensible despots have never confined that precaution to women: they have taken their whips with them when they have dealt with men, and been slavishly idealized by the men over whom they have flourished the whip much more than by women. No doubt there are slavish women as well as slavish men; and women, like men, admire those that are stronger than themselves. But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person’s thumb are two different things. The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out. Accordingly, it is a truth everywhere in evidence that strong people, masculine or feminine, not only do not marry stronger people, but do not show any preference for them in selecting their friends. When a lion meets another with a louder roar “the first lion thinks the last a bore.” The man or woman who feels strong enough for two, seeks for every other quality in a partner than strength.
The converse is also true. Weak people want to marry strong people who do not frighten them too much; and this often leads them to make the mistake we describe metaphorically as “biting off more than they can chew.” They want too much for too little; and when the bargain is unreasonable beyond all bearing, the union becomes impossible: it ends in the weaker party being either discarded or borne as a cross, which is worse. People who are not only weak, but silly or obtuse as well, are often in these difficulties.
This being the state of human affairs, what is Eliza fairly sure to do when she is placed between Freddy and Higgins? Will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers? There can be no doubt about the answer. Unless Freddy is biologically repulsive to her, and Higgins biologically attractive to a degree that overwhelms all her other instincts, she will, if she marries either of them, marry Freddy.
And that is just what Eliza did.
Complications ensued; but they were economic, not romantic. Freddy had no money and no occupation. His mother’s jointure, a last relic of the opulence of Largelady Park, had enabled her to struggle along in Earlscourt with an air of gentility, but not to procure any serious secondary education for her children, much less give the boy a profession. A clerkship at thirty shillings a week was beneath Freddy’s dignity, and extremely distasteful to him besides. His prospects consisted of a hope that if he kept up appearances somebody would do something for him. The something appeared vaguely to his imagination as a private secretaryship or a sinecure of some sort. To his mother it perhaps appeared as a marriage to some lady of means who could not resist her boy’s niceness. Fancy her feelings when he married a flower girl who had become declassee under extraordinary circumstances which were now notorious!
It is true that Eliza’s situation did not seem wholly ineligible. Her father, though formerly a dustman, and now fantastically disclassed, had become extremely popular in the smartest society by a social talent which triumphed over every prejudice and every disadvantage. Rejected by the middle class, which he loathed, he had shot up at once into the highest circles by his wit, his dustmanship (which he carried like a banner), and his Nietzschean transcendence of good and evil. At intimate ducal dinners he sat on the right hand of the Duchess; and in country houses he smoked in the pantry and was made much of by the butler when he was not feeding in the dining-room and being consulted by cabinet ministers. But he found it almost as hard to do all this on four thousand a year as Mrs. Eynsford Hill to live in Earlscourt on an income so pitiably smaller that I have not the heart to disclose its exact figure. He absolutely refused to add the last straw to his burden by contributing to Eliza’s support.
Thus Freddy and Eliza, now Mr. and Mrs. Eynsford Hill, would have spent a penniless honeymoon but for a wedding present of 500 pounds from the Colonel to Eliza. It lasted a long time because Freddy did not know how to spend money, never having had any to spend, and Eliza, socially trained by a pair of old bachelors, wore her clothes as long as they held together and looked pretty, without the least regard to their being many months out of fashion. Still, 500 pounds will not last two young people for ever; and they both knew, and Eliza felt as well, that they must shift for themselves in the end. She could quarter herself on Wimpole Street because it had come to be her home; but she was quite aware that she ought not to quarter Freddy there, and that it would not be good for his character if she did.
Not that the Wimpole Street bachelors objected. When she consulted them, Higgins declined to be bothered about her housing problem when that solution was so simple. Eliza’s desire to have Freddy in the house with her seemed of no more importance than if she had wanted an extra piece of bedroom furniture. Pleas as to Freddy’s character, and the moral obligation on him to earn his own living, were lost on Higgins. He denied that Freddy had any character, and declared that if he tried to do any useful work some competent person would have the trouble of undoing it: a procedure involving a net loss to the community, and great unhappiness to Freddy himself, who was obviously intended by Nature for such light work as amusing Eliza, which, Higgins declared, was a much more useful and honorable occupation than working in the city. When Eliza referred again to her project of teaching phonetics, Higgins abated not a jot of his violent opposition to it. He said she was not within ten years of being qualified to meddle with his pet subject; and as it was evident that the Colonel agreed with him, she felt she could not go against them in this grave matter, and that she had no right, without Higgins’s consent, to exploit the knowledge he had given her; for his knowledge seemed to her as much his private property as his watch: Eliza was no communist. Besides, she was superstitiously devoted to them both, more entirely and frankly after her marriage than before it.
It was the Colonel who finally solved the problem, which had cost him much perplexed cogitation. He one day asked Eliza, rather shyly, whether she had quite given up her notion of keeping a flower shop. She replied that she had thought of it, but had put it out of her head, because the Colonel had said, that day at Mrs. Higgins’s, that it would never do. The Colonel confessed that when he said that, he had not quite recovered from the dazzling impression of the day before. They broke the matter to Higgins that evening. The sole comment vouchsafed by him very nearly led to a serious quarrel with Eliza. It was to the effect that she would have in Freddy an ideal errand boy.
Freddy himself was next sounded on the subject. He said he had been thinking of a shop himself; though it had presented itself to his pennilessness as a small place in which Eliza should sell tobacco at one counter whilst he sold newspapers at the opposite one. But he agreed that it would be extraordinarily jolly to go early every morning with Eliza to Covent Garden and buy flowers on the scene of their first meeting: a sentiment which earned him many kisses from his wife. He added that he had always been afraid to propose anything of the sort, because Clara would make an awful row about a step that must damage her matrimonial chances, and his mother could not be expected to like it after clinging for so many years to that step of the social ladder on which retail trade is impossible.
This difficulty was removed by an event highly unexpected by Freddy’s mother. Clara, in the course of her incursions into those artistic circles which were the highest within her reach, discovered that her conversational qualifications were expected to include a grounding in the novels of Mr. H.G. Wells. She borrowed them in various directions so energetically that she swallowed them all within two months. The result was a conversion of a kind quite common today. A modern Acts of the Apostles would fill fifty whole Bibles if anyone were capable of writing it.
Poor Clara, who appeared to Higgins and his mother as a disagreeable and ridiculous person, and to her own mother as in some inexplicable way a social failure, had never seen herself in either light; for, though to some extent ridiculed and mimicked in West Kensington like everybody else there, she was accepted as a rational and normal—or shall we say inevitable?—sort of human being. At worst they called her The Pusher; but to them no more than to herself had it ever occurred that she was pushing the air, and pushing it in a wrong direction. Still, she was not happy. She was growing desperate. Her one asset, the fact that her mother was what the Epsom greengrocer called a carriage lady had no exchange value, apparently. It had prevented her from getting educated, because the only education she could have afforded was education with the Earlscourt green grocer’s daughter. It had led her to seek the society of her mother’s class; and that class simply would not have her, because she was much poorer than the greengrocer, and, far from being able to afford a maid, could not afford even a housemaid, and had to scrape along at home with an illiberally treated general servant. Under such circumstances nothing could give her an air of being a genuine product of Largelady Park. And yet its tradition made her regard a marriage with anyone within her reach as an unbearable humiliation. Commercial people and professional people in a small way were odious to her. She ran after painters and novelists; but she did not charm them; and her bold attempts to pick up and practise artistic and literary talk irritated them. She was, in short, an utter failure, an ignorant, incompetent, pretentious, unwelcome, penniless, useless little snob; and though she did not admit these disqualifications (for nobody ever faces unpleasant truths of this kind until the possibility of a way out dawns on them) she felt their effects too keenly to be satisfied with her position.
Clara had a startling eyeopener when, on being suddenly wakened to enthusiasm by a girl of her own age who dazzled her and produced in her a gushing desire to take her for a model, and gain her friendship, she discovered that this exquisite apparition had graduated from the gutter in a few months’ time. It shook her so violently, that when Mr. H. G. Wells lifted her on the point of his puissant pen, and placed her at the angle of view from which the life she was leading and the society to which she clung appeared in its true relation to real human needs and worthy social structure, he effected a conversion and a conviction of sin comparable to the most sensational feats of General Booth or Gypsy Smith. Clara’s snobbery went bang. Life suddenly began to move with her. Without knowing how or why, she began to make friends and enemies. Some of the acquaintances to whom she had been a tedious or indifferent or ridiculous affliction, dropped her: others became cordial. To her amazement she found that some “quite nice” people were saturated with Wells, and that this accessibility to ideas was the secret of their niceness. People she had thought deeply religious, and had tried to conciliate on that tack with disastrous results, suddenly took an interest in her, and revealed a hostility to conventional religion which she had never conceived possible except among the most desperate characters. They made her read Galsworthy; and Galsworthy exposed the vanity of Largelady Park and finished her. It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact. In the radiance of these discoveries, and the tumult of their reaction, she made a fool of herself as freely and conspicuously as when she so rashly adopted Eliza’s expletive in Mrs. Higgins’s drawing-room; for the new-born Wellsian had to find her bearings almost as ridiculously as a baby; but nobody hates a baby for its ineptitudes, or thinks the worse of it for trying to eat the matches; and Clara lost no friends by her follies. They laughed at her to her face this time; and she had to defend herself and fight it out as best she could.
When Freddy paid a visit to Earlscourt (which he never did when he could possibly help it) to make the desolating announcement that he and his Eliza were thinking of blackening the Largelady scutcheon by opening a shop, he found the little household already convulsed by a prior announcement from Clara that she also was going to work in an old furniture shop in Dover Street, which had been started by a fellow Wellsian. This appointment Clara owed, after all, to her old social accomplishment of Push. 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. Clara talked of nothing else for weeks and weeks afterwards. And as she happened to talk to the lady of the furniture shop, and that lady also desired above all things to know Mr. Wells and sell pretty things to him, she offered Clara a job on the chance of achieving that end through her.
And so it came about that Eliza’s luck held, and the expected opposition to the flower shop melted away. The shop is in the arcade of a railway station not very far from the Victoria and Albert Museum; and if you live in that neighborhood you may go there any day and buy a buttonhole from Eliza.
Now here is a last opportunity for romance. Would you not like to be assured that the shop was an immense success, thanks to Eliza’s charms and her early business experience in Covent Garden? Alas! the truth is the truth: the shop did not pay for a long time, simply because Eliza and her Freddy did not know how to keep it. True, Eliza had not to begin at the very beginning: she knew the names and prices of the cheaper flowers; and her elation was unbounded when she found that Freddy, like all youths educated at cheap, pretentious, and thoroughly inefficient schools, knew a little Latin. It was very little, but enough to make him appear to her a Porson or Bentley, and to put him at his ease with botanical nomenclature. Unfortunately he knew nothing else; and Eliza, though she could count money up to eighteen shillings or so, and had acquired a certain familiarity with the language of Milton from her struggles to qualify herself for winning Higgins’s bet, could not write out a bill without utterly disgracing the establishment. Freddy’s power of stating in Latin that Balbus built a wall and that Gaul was divided into three parts did not carry with it the slightest knowledge of accounts or business: Colonel Pickering had to explain to him what a cheque book and a bank account meant. And the pair were by no means easily teachable. Freddy backed up Eliza in her obstinate refusal to believe that they could save money by engaging a bookkeeper with some knowledge of the business. How, they argued, could you possibly save money by going to extra expense when you already could not make both ends meet? But the Colonel, after making the ends meet over and over again, at last gently insisted; and Eliza, humbled to the dust by having to beg from him so often, and stung by the uproarious derision of Higgins, to whom the notion of Freddy succeeding at anything was a joke that never palled, grasped the fact that business, like phonetics, has to be learned.
On the piteous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping and typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female, from the elementary schools, let me not dwell. There were even classes at the London School of Economics, and a humble personal appeal to the director of that institution to recommend a course bearing on the flower business. He, being a humorist, explained to them the method of the celebrated Dickensian essay on Chinese Metaphysics by the gentleman who read an article on China and an article on Metaphysics and combined the information. He suggested that they should combine the London School with Kew Gardens. Eliza, to whom the procedure of the Dickensian gentleman seemed perfectly correct (as in fact it was) and not in the least funny (which was only her ignorance) took his advice with entire gravity. But the effort that cost her the deepest humiliation was a request to Higgins, whose pet artistic fancy, next to Milton’s verse, was calligraphy, and who himself wrote a most beautiful Italian hand, that he would teach her to write. He declared that she was congenitally incapable of forming a single letter worthy of the least of Milton’s words; but she persisted; and again he suddenly threw himself into the task of teaching her with a combination of stormy intensity, concentrated patience, and occasional bursts of interesting disquisition on the beauty and nobility, the august mission and destiny, of human handwriting. Eliza ended by acquiring an extremely uncommercial script which was a positive extension of her personal beauty, and spending three times as much on stationery as anyone else because certain qualities and shapes of paper became indispensable to her. She could not even address an envelope in the usual way because it made the margins all wrong.
Their commercial school days were a period of disgrace and despair for the young couple. They seemed to be learning nothing about flower shops. At last they gave it up as hopeless, and shook the dust of the shorthand schools, and the polytechnics, and the London School of Economics from their feet for ever. Besides, the business was in some mysterious way beginning to take care of itself. They had somehow forgotten their objections to employing other people. They came to the conclusion that their own way was the best, and that they had really a remarkable talent for business. The Colonel, who had been compelled for some years to keep a sufficient sum on current account at his bankers to make up their deficits, found that the provision was unnecessary: the young people were prospering. It is true that there was not quite fair play between them and their competitors in trade. Their week-ends in the country cost them nothing, and saved them the price of their Sunday dinners; for the motor car was the Colonel’s; and he and Higgins paid the hotel bills. Mr. F. Hill, florist and greengrocer (they soon discovered that there was money in asparagus; and asparagus led to other vegetables), had an air which stamped the business as classy; and in private life he was still Frederick Eynsford Hill, Esquire. Not that there was any swank about him: nobody but Eliza knew that he had been christened Frederick Challoner. Eliza herself swanked like anything.
That is all. That is how it has turned out. It is astonishing how much Eliza still manages to meddle in the housekeeping at Wimpole Street in spite of the shop and her own family. And it is notable that though she never nags her husband, and frankly loves the Colonel as if she were his favorite daughter, she has never got out of the habit of nagging Higgins that was established on the fatal night when she won his bet for him. She snaps his head off on the faintest provocation, or on none. He no longer dares to tease her by assuming an abysmal inferiority of Freddy’s mind to his own. He storms and bullies and derides; but she stands up to him so ruthlessly that the Colonel has to ask her from time to time to be kinder to Higgins; and it is the only request of his that brings a mulish expression into her face. Nothing but some emergency or calamity great enough to break down all likes and dislikes, and throw them both back on their common humanity—and may they be spared any such trial!—will ever alter this. She knows that Higgins does not need her, just as her father did not need her. The very scrupulousness with which he told her that day that he had become used to having her there, and dependent on her for all sorts of little services, and that he should miss her if she went away (it would never have occurred to Freddy or the Colonel to say anything of the sort) deepens her inner certainty that she is “no more to him than them slippers”, yet she has a sense, too, that his indifference is deeper than the infatuation of commoner souls. She is immensely interested in him. She has even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she could get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his pedestal and see him making love like any common man. We all have private imaginations of that sort. But when it comes to business, to the life that she really leads as distinguished from the life of dreams and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel; and she does not like Higgins and Mr. Doolittle. Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable.
Roundabout Theatre Company staged Pygmalion in its 2007–08 season and created a guide with artist interviews, history, and discussion questions about the show.
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