A New Urban Modernity? George Bernard Shaw’s Written Recollection of His Mother’s Cremation.

Authors

• Gian Luca Amadei Independent Scholar

Abstract

In a letter, written on Saturday, February 22, 1913, the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw described to his actress friend Stella Campbell the eventful day of his mother’s funeral and cremation at Golders Green Crematorium in London. From Shaw’s recollection, two intertwined aspects of his experience emerge. One is internal—intellectual and emotional—and the other is external, informed by the environment in which this funerary experience took place. By retracing Shaw’s steps, this article questions the extent to which his recollections of the spatial qualities of the crematorium, London’s emerging metro system, and the newly planned suburb were signs of a new urban experience. I discuss the changing space of the city in the early twentieth century by drawing on urban history, death culture, and architecture. The intention is to highlight how these elements—transport, crematorium, and suburb—all embodied the notions of order and efficiency, which promised a new idea of urban living in early twentieth-century London.