An Introduction to Bernard Shaw's "To Your Tents, Oh Israel!"

Abstract

abstract:"To Your Tents, Oh Israel!" may be Shaw's key work of political journalism written during his time as a full-time journalist. Shaw drafted the essay, signed "The Fabian Society" when published in the Fortnightly Review (November 1893), with input from Sidney Webb and the approval of the Fabian Society executive and publishing committees. As Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary: "The excitement of the autumn has been the issue of the Fabian manifesto … Shaw's manufacturing out of Sidney's facts." As an attack on Gladstone's Liberal Party for its failure after nearly two years in government to fulfill the promises of the 1891 Newcastle Program, the manifesto, dripping with sarcasm (unusual enough in Shaw's polemics) and heightened irony, succeeded in its aim of effecting a cleavage between the Fabian Society and the Liberal Party, after seven years spent assiduously permeating it.