First edition. Original sage green cloth titled in gilt on the spine. Author's contemporary presentation copy, inscribed on the half title (a week before publication), "To Sydney & Beatrice Webb from G. B.S. 16 June 1921." A very good copy, with a little light soiling.

An exceptional association copy. Shaw first met Sidney Webb at a meeting of the Zetetical Society in 1879, and it was with the Webbs that Shaw essentially founded the Fabian Society, the socialist political organisation dedicated to transforming Britain into a socialist state, not by revolution but by systematic progressive legislation, bolstered by persuasion and mass education. The Fabian Society would later be instrumental in founding the London School of Economics and the Labour Party. It remains Shaw's lasting political legacy.
On attending an exploratory meeting of potential 'Fabians',
"Shaw had found his official milieu. He went away and returned with a Zetetical discovery of his: one Sidney Webb (later Lord Passfield), then resident clerk at the Colonial office... Wherever Shaw has succeeded you will find that he has attached himself to some more enterprising spirit who has taken all the money risks... In his Fabian phase he picked Sidney Webb; and the firm of Sidney and Beatrice Webb proved a very sound political investment." (Frank Harris - Bernard Shaw).
Written as an attempt to find his way out of post-war pessimism, Back to Methuselah is a linking of five plays exploring the same ideologies as the much earlier 'Man and Superman', as it dramatises Shaw's evolutionary theories and explores the history of human progress from the Garden of Eden to a science-fiction future.

Stock ID: 24163