Major Barbara was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in November 1905 and published by Constable in 1907. The play is Shaw’s most sustained engagement with the relationship between money, morality, and power, and its argument — that poverty is the worst of crimes and that the destruction of poverty justifies almost any means — remains as provocative today as it was in 1905.
Barbara Undershaft is a Major in the Salvation Army, devoted to saving souls in the East End of London. Her father, Andrew Undershaft, is a millionaire arms manufacturer — a man who makes cannons and explosives and is not in the least ashamed of it. The dramatic conflict arises when Undershaft visits the Salvation Army shelter and offers a large donation. Barbara is initially delighted, then horrified when she realizes that the Salvation Army will accept money from anyone — including whiskey distillers and arms dealers — and that her own organization’s survival depends on the very economic system she is trying to mitigate.
The play’s climactic scene takes Barbara to her father’s factory town, where she discovers that Undershaft has created a model community for his workers — clean housing, good food, excellent schools, a library — that is more effective at eliminating human suffering than all the Salvation Army’s soup kitchens. The workers are well-fed, well-housed, and (Undershaft would say) free — but their freedom and comfort are paid for by the manufacture of weapons that kill people in wars. Shaw does not resolve this contradiction; he presents it as the fundamental paradox of capitalism and leaves the audience to wrestle with it.
Undershaft is one of Shaw’s greatest characters — a man of immense charm, absolute honesty about his own motives, and a ruthless logic that exposes the hypocrisy of everyone around him. His argument — “I am a millionaire. That is my religion” — is both monstrous and compelling, and Shaw gives him all the best lines. Barbara, whose faith is genuinely sincere, is left not defeated but transformed: she accepts that spiritual salvation without material security is meaningless, and resolves to save souls not from sin but from poverty.
Collecting Major Barbara
First edition (Constable, London, 1907): Published in the volume John Bull’s Other Island and Major Barbara. Green cloth.
Market values:
- First edition (in combined volume): $60–$200
- First separate edition: $30–$80
- Later editions: $5–$15