Parnell, Disarmament, and the Morality Frenzy

Abstract

The first subject examined in this chapter is the popular press’ destruction of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1890–1891 as Stead led the newspaper morality campaign in the wake of the Whitechapel murders. The press coverage provides the context for Shaw’s next important foray into journalism (again, separate from his art, literary, music, and theater criticism). As with his response to Whitechapel, Shaw reaches with precision into the very essence of the Parnell scandal and dismisses the relentless sensationalizing press that moralistically criminalized and demonized Parnell. Shaw cut to the truth and, in doing so, revealed that Parnell was not a demon. The real problem lay with the marriage law that made it far more difficult for a woman to obtain a divorce than a man. It had locked Katharine O’Shea to her estranged husband, despite her established relationship with Parnell that included children. Again Shaw’s voice rings out at a monumental moment in the continued development of London’s New Journalism. The chapter also reveals that while many of Shaw’s contemporaries (W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, and James Joyce among them), made much of Parnell’s fall and used it to initiate a campaign to modernize an Ireland still clinging to archaic moral values, only Shaw among them had an accurate view of Parnell’s destruction. Most Irish writers of the period held the Dublin Catholic press responsible for driving Parnell from his position as leader of the Irish Party, but Shaw knew instead that it was the London popular press that instigated and carried out Parnell’s overthrow. When the scandal began to be publicized in London newspapers, the Dublin press at first supported Parnell, but Stead and the London press forced the Irish Party’s ally in Britain, the Liberal Party, to demand Parnell’s removal from his position. This led some members of the Irish Party to turn against Parnell, and only then did Dublin newspapers join the anti-Parnell campaign. The second analysis in Chapter 2 discusses Shaw’s interaction with Stead’s peace crusade and, in Shaw’s view, Stead’s misguided notions about disarmament and his gushing affinity for the tyrannical Russian autocratic Tsar Nicholas II. Shaw responded journalistically when the London press and public called for Nicholas’ short-lived disarmament agenda to be embraced while simultaneously celebrating past war victories, such as the Battle of Trafalgar.