This book traces the effects of materiality - including money and its
opposite, poverty - on the psychical lives of George Bernard Shaw and
his characters. While this study focuses on the protagonists of the five
novels Shaw wrote in the late 1870s and early 1880s, it also explores
how materialism, feeling, and emotion are linked throughout his entire
canon. At the same time, it demonstrates how Shaw's conceptions of human
subjectivity parallel those of two of his contemporaries, Sigmund Freud
and Georg Simmel. In particular, this book explores how theories of
so-called 'marginal economics' influence fin de siècle thought about
human psychology and the sociology of the modern metropolis,
particularly London.