Shavian (1/3): origins

The background of the alphabetic utopia theorised by G.B. Shaw, between spelling and phonetic reform of the English language

By the time that his vision of a new alphabet for the English language had been realised and printed, George Bernard Shaw was dead. A Nobel-winning playwright, critic and polemicist, he spent half a century exasperated by how English was written and campaigning for its reform. It would be twelve years after his ashes were scattered before people might have found — innocuous amongst the shelves of their local libraries — that strange biscript edition of Androcles and the Lion: its pages now creamed, dried and softened with age; every other page inscrutable and seemingly printed with tinned spaghetti. Shavian.

Shavian was to be an ideal alphabet: easier to read, write and print and accurately reflecting speech. It is a rare example not only of a new writing system, but of one that was adapted for 20th-century printing technology. Along with the alphabet itself, its designer, Ronald Kingsley Read (who went by Kingsley Read), would be responsible for three hot-metal fonts for the printing of Androcles, and another for a small number of typewriters that could be ordered, for a time, from the Imperial Typewriter Company.

For constructed writing systems, let alone constructed writing systems of the 20th century, Shavian enjoyed a rare degree of technical implementation, skilled execution and, thanks to its association with Shaw, public attention. But despite all that it was a failure. Shaw’s dream of replacing Latin with a writing system that was scientific, rational, efficient, ergonomic and so much more, may have been made almost real, but all the lead, tin and antimony, all the ink pressed into paper to make it real wasn’t quite enough. Shavian is now largely relegated to the cupboard of typographic curiosities.

This is the first in a series of three articles where I will discuss the context, development and typographic implementation of Shavian, covering a period of more than sixty years. Along with the arguments Shaw ventilated in his public campaign for reforming English writing, I will draw on correspondence between him, Read, and other spelling and alphabet reformers; examine drawings and guide books that show Shavian at different stages of development; and show the technical drawings that Read produced when designing the first Shavian fonts for Androcles and the Lion.

This article will be primarily concerned with the arguments for an ideal orthography, how Shaw’s thinking developed and how the intellectual framework for Shavian was assembled.

George Bernard Shaw, looking, typically, to the left.

George Bernard Shaw and the quest for a phonetic alphabet

One of Shaw’s first public expressions of how much English spelling exasperated him can be seen in his notes to his play Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1900). In writing the dialogue, Shaw had attempted to capture some of the character of the accents of his Cockney and Scottish protagonists and the process had left him vexed. He complains in the opening paragraph: ‘The fact that English is spelt conventionally and not phonetically makes the art of recording speech almost impossible.’

Despite their observations on how people speak, the notes to Brassbound, perhaps uniquely amongst Shaw’s prefaces, remain notes on how its characters should be heard to speak. By the following August, Shaw was to shift from being an observer of the disjunction between speech and writing to being an overt campaigner. After an article in the Morning Leader contended that, owing to spelling conventions, the English language had hardly changed since the Elizabethan era, Shaw launched himself at the letters pages of papers with several thousand-word letters, the first of which ran under the heading A plea for speech nationalisation.[1]

Over the first decades of his campaign, Shaw’s letters to the Morning Herald and The Times combine several strains of argument, but strike a progressive note. Shaw argued that what is judged ‘correct’ pronunciation is a product of fashion and prevalence. As mass education became more effective, and the working classes more literate, people were, according to Shaw, beginning to:

please themselves by dragging into ordinary conversation more and more long words which they [had] never heard pronounced, they introduce ways of their own of pronouncing them, founded necessarily on spelling… I foresee the time when I shall be forced to pronounce semi-conscious as See My Conscious.[2]

But preventing such dystopian horrors was not Shaw’s primary concern: improved education was producing well-educated, capable individuals and Shaw, like HG Wells, believed they would become and should become the dominant force in the social order.[3] Their success and progress itself was being blocked by the snobbery of the class system, the shibboleths of their pronunciation ‘obstructing [their] way through life more than three or four sentences of imprisonment would obstruct a peer’s.’[4]

In Shaw’s mind, simplifying spelling was not the answer — that would be ‘indistinguishable from ordinary wrong spelling’[5] – but alphabetic: a phonetic alphabet. He dismissed any notion that fundamentally altering the Latin alphabet might be impractical. Phoneticists, Shaw argued, required no ‘special type for [their] reading lessons: ordinary type can be made to suffice when the vowels are eked out by turning e and c upside down occasionally.’ That said, however, Shaw still contended that the Latin alphabet needed to be supplemented by new characters designed by ‘an artist with a fully developed sense of beauty in writing and printing.’[6]

Happily, he knew one: Robert Bridges.

Spelling and phonetic reform in the US and the UK

At the start of the 20th century, Shaw was not operating in a vacuum. In America, the librarian, classifier and founder of the Spelling Reform Association, Melvil Dewey, had secured the support of Scottish industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie to seriously pursue the subject of spelling reform. With money from Carnegie, Dewey organised The Simplified Spelling Board whose proposals and publications won Theodore Roosevelt’s approval. In August 1906 the president directed US Government Printing Offices to implement a list of 300 of the Simplified Spelling Board’s recommendations.

These proposals, even before they received presidential approval, attracted controversy. George Anderson’s history of Carnegie’s involvement in spelling reform quotes Arthur Conan Doyle’s emphatic words: ‘Reformed spelling might become universal but it would cease to be the English language.’ By contrast, in the Atlanta Constitution, Mark Twain, attacked the proposals (which included such novelties ‘catalog’ and ‘honor’) as not going far enough.[7]

In the UK, Shaw’s friend Robert Bridges — the poet laureate from 1913–1930 and, later, colleague on the BBC’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English — also had an interest in phonetically reforming the alphabet. Unlike others, Bridges was also directly involved with the printing and production of books: his own volumes of poetry. In 1902, with Edward Johnston’s consultation Bridges was in the process of developing a phonetic adaptation of an uncial script,[8] an example of which he reproduced for Now in Wintry Delights (1903).