“Why Can’t the English?”

Abstract

In My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins asks a provocative question: “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?” Since Higgins is a literary character, we might assume that both he and Shaw held the same disparaging opinion of the uneducated Eliza Doolittle. But a careful reading of Pygmalion suggests that Shaw did not share Higgins’s dismissive attitude toward “bad” English and the people who speak it. We can speculate that writing Pygmalion—which critics have long recognized as a play about language—caused Shaw to start questioning some widespread assumptions about the intersection between English grammar and social class.