‘Wherever the prospect is bounded by trees or rising green grounds, it is a pleasant place. Where the ground stretches flat to the grey palings, with bricks and mortar, sky signs, crowded chimneys and smoke beyond, the prospect makes it desolate and sordid.’ Desolate? It was dense with dumb humanity!

The turn-around in Victoria’s reputation in the first ten or twelve years of her reign is well exemplified in the creation of Victoria Park, Hackney. Her reign was copper-fastened in similar acts of honorific commemoration from Hong Kong to western Canada by way of Australia. Relentlessly, Victorian civil servants and military governors inscribed her name in town charters, and even on the waters of the Zambezi River. This was imperial mobility at its most seductive. There was of course another side to the Victorian miracle, painfully disclosed at home in housing inquiries. The Fabians were only the latest campaigners against Victorianism.

The perpetuation – even growth – of social injustice over which the Queen long presided is skilfully examined in Shaw’s plays. Unlike Brecht or even late O’Casey, he deals in individuals. Candida is a strong woman, owing more to the actresses of the age than to the presiding monarch. In a preface to Plays Pleasant which Shaw wrote later, he perceived that ‘the modern Kaiser, Dictator, President or Prime Minister is nothing if not an effective actor’ or, perhaps, actress. Drawing on Marx, and anticipating Walter Benjamin by more than a generation, Shaw pinpointed the dangerous mutual exchangeability of drama and politics while appearing to buffoon about the Balkans.

As Europe discovered to its surprise in August 1914, the Balkans were no laughing matter. Little in English literature had prepared the citizens of London for the Zeppelin raids. No one had imagined the sound in Kent of guns in France. Shaw attends to these matters in perhaps his greatest play, Heartbreak House (first produced in New York in 1920). Saint Joan (1923) delves into the history of Anglo-French relations; it explores the mystery of faith in a new century of barbarous idolatry. But the essentials go back to the 1898 two-volume set and, more particularly, to the pleasant plays.

That is to speak of Shaw’s success, Shaw’s greatness. We still have to live with the laughter, inquire into its origins and signification. To do so may involve taking the religion of Candida seriously rather than its politics. Dismissive of creeds and particularities, Shaw was not the ecumenical atheist he sometimes played. His religious instincts lay in the deep soil of protestant dissent, the religion of Milton and Blake. Like Joyce, he adopted the Satanic motto, Non Serviam (I will not serve). A certain heartlessness in the adult Shaw is protective and elusive; we can study its twin more readily in young Stephen Dedalus’s refusal to pray for his mother. And the laughter which breaks out in the Shavian Balkans is heard again in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and (more disturbingly still) in Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus (1947).

To be ready for the new century was one of Shaw’s strengths in the eyes of the late Victorian theatregoer. No more fustian instead of courage, no more limpidity paraded as good manners. As with Freud’s revelations, Shavian form and dialogue were appreciated while also being secretly feared. The stage-set became a consulting room where only the analysts spoke, but only spoke the anxieties of absent patients. If this was a virtue in 1897 it carried its own virus, an affinity with the terrors to come – dictatorship, sadistic cruelty, war, the Balkan atrocities of the 1990s. We revel in the early plays, we admire Major Barbara (1905), we sit in awe of Heartbreak House and Saint Joan, we applaud the award of the Nobel Prize (1925). One reason for our loud commendations lies in the certainty that we must dislike what comes next.

As for the later Shaw, it is best that we keep thinking. His foresight did not equal the self-questioning which suddenly illuminates the little general at Tavazzano in the pleasant play of 1897 – the year of Dracula and its pre-emptive assault on modernity.