When he first moved to London he struggled as a writer
After losing one of his sisters when he was 20, George Bernard Shaw left Dublin and made his way to London. It was another 29 years before he went back to Ireland.
George was supported for the majority of his 20s by his mother, who owned a home in South Kensington where she let him reside. A fascinating fact about George Bernard Shaw is that he attempted to publish multiple novels but failed, and along the way, he was forced to work some office jobs. He also adopted a vegetarian diet at this time and developed a beard as long as he was.
His first foray into television, which he started in 1878, was a drum parody with religious overtones. Like his debut novel, it was abandoned before being completed. Immaturity (1879), his first finished book, was too poor to find publishers and didn't come out until the 1930s.
For the following four years, Shaw's mother helped to finance his meager writing income. He switched to vegetarianism in 1881 due to financial constraints and then more as a matter of conviction. To conceal a smallpox scar on his face, he grew a beard. When Shaw entered his first love engagement with a woman at the age of 29, his fortunes started to change in his late 20s. He quickly produced two further books, The Unreasonable Knot (1880) and Love Between Artists (1881), neither of which could find a publisher. Both were serialized in the socialist publication "Our Corner" several years later.
