ABSTRACT
The first publications of the Society, while socialist in character, lacked both analytical and prescriptive precision. The situation was transformed by the advent of two men – the Irish wit and playwright G. B. Shaw and a civil servant at the Colonial Office, Sidney Webb. The literary flair of the former and the investigative energies of the latter made them a formidable combination and, together with figures such as Sydney Olivier, William Clarke, Beatrice Webb, Annie Besant and, for a time, H. G. Wells, they equipped the Society with a political economy that exerted a profound influence within the Labour Party well into the post-1945 period.
