This column first appeared in the Victoria Daily Times on July 8, 1939.
She is well known in Gordon Head, this Covent Garden flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, who in six months was changed into an English beauty and passed for a duchess at an ambassador’s reception.
We have all seen Pygmalion. Some of us have seen it twice. The second showing brings out the fine points, such as the rhythmic speech of Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle, the dustman, and his “native woodnotes wild”; his defence of the underserving poor; and his reasons for not accepting 10 pounds for the loss of Eliza instead of five.
“Ten pounds,” he said, “makes a man prudent-like, and there’s an end to happiness. No, give me the five, and don’t think I’ll save it and spare it and live idle on it. There won’t be a penny left on Monday.”
In the first showing, I was so concerned with the story I missed this fine piece of philosophy.
For the story itself is a good one. Eliza Doolittle, on a rainy night in Covent Garden selling her flowers, finds to her horror that there is a man taking down every word she utters. Naturally, she believes it bodes her no good. She appeals to him to leave her be, for she “is a good girl, and meant no ’arm.”
After a great scene of confusion, she finds the notetaker is interested only in her dialect. This is his business, and to show that he knows dialects, he tells the people in the crowd that gathered where they were born and where they have lived. He can place people within six miles of their birthplace, he says, and in London within two streets. He makes his living teaching people how to talk — Kentish townfolk who make money want to forget Kentish town, but every time they open their mouths their birthplace is proclaimed — so he earns a tidy income teaching the new rich how to speak.
The notetaker tells Eliza her kerbstone English will keep her in the gutter all her life.
“Remember,” he says to her sternly, “you are a human being with a soul and the gift of articulate speech. Your native language is the language of Milton, Shakespeare and the Bible, and yet you sit crooning there like a bilious pigeon.”
Miss Doolittle resents this and to appease and get rid of her, Professor Higgins, the notetaker, throws a handful of coins in her basket. Miss Doolittle goes home triumphantly in a taxi.
“Angel’s Court, Drury Lane, round the corner from Micklejohn’s oil shop, and step on it,” says Miss Doolittle to the astonished driver.
In subsequent scenes you see the struggles of Professor Higgins to make a lady of Eliza, for his boast that he can pass her off as a duchess in six months has been taken up by his friend, Colonel Pickering. Eliza practises diligently such sentences as the “rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain,” and “in Hereford and Hasting hurricanes hardly ever happen.”
You see the great night of the ambassador’s reception when Eliza Doolittle in white satin, a tiara of diamonds in her black hair, makes a sensation. She knows her piece and performs perfectly. She dances with royalty. But when all is over, the bet won, lessons ended, the problem arises — what is to become of Eliza?
Eliza is spoiled for flower-selling. She can’t go back to Angel’s Court, Drury Lane, and Professor Higgins, intent on his phonograph records and dialects and research in kindred lines, does not see what has happened. A stormy scene closes the perfect hour of triumph — Eliza throws his slippers in his face, and he calls her a “heartless guttersnipe.”
The second time I saw it, I waited in line for the 9 o’clock showing, and inferred from conversations that ranged up and down the queue that my companions in line had seen it, too. One young girl said she was sure Professor Higgins was really in love with Eliza, and they would be married and live happily. An older woman said Eliza’s culture was only skin deep, and she would return to Angel’s Court and make her fortune selling flowers. People would point her out as the girl who fooled all the “swells” at the reception, and, besides, people would love to hear her talk her quality English right down among the wheelbarrows, with live eels for sale, on the stalls beside her.
No one mentioned Freddy. And I haven’t, either. But Freddy is important.
Freddy is a smiling young man who appears in the first act, and at intervals all through the play, laden with flowers for Miss Doolittle, and when Miss Doolittle runs away from Professor Higgins after their quarrel, on her way to drown herself in the river, Freddy appears, and tells her of his love.
Freddy is “gently born” — his mother is a carriage lady. Freddy has no job and no prospects, but George Bernard Shaw produced Freddy with a purpose.
And now a Shaw student has come forward to tell us that the great playwright knew that we would be confused by the ending, and so has told us, in a few crisp words, what really did happen to the Dustman’s Daughter.
No, she did not marry the professor. She married Freddy. Eliza is a strong woman, and therefore can afford to marry Freddy. She supports him very well, in a flower shop. Freddy even knows a few Latin names for the flowers, and what a help that is! The shop, says Mr. Shaw, is in the arcade of a railway station not far from the Victoria and Albert Museum, and there any day you can go and buy a buttonhole from Eliza.
She still goes to see the professor, and snaps his head off when he makes slighting remarks about Freddy. He did say that Freddy had it in him to be the ideal errand boy. But the flower shop is a great success, and Eliza rides in a taxi every day, and with Freddy’s help manages to hold her “h’s” in check.
