ABSTRACT
H enry Sweet (1845-1912) was described by an admiring George Bernard Shaw as 'the brainiest Oxford don of his time', and he is best known to the general public through Shaw's supposed transformation of him into the irascible phonetician Professor Higgins in Pygmalion and subsequently the musical My Fair Lady. The real Sweet was the son of a barrister at the Inner Temple. As a child he was subject to fits and was so short-sighted that he had difficulty in reading. He attended a private school in Tottenham, and then King's College School, London before moving in 1864 to study philology in Heidelberg. He then spent a brief period as a clerk before entering BaHiol College, Oxford in 1869. He seems not to have been suited to the study of classical languages and achieved very poor results, although drawing attention to himself by winning the Taylorian prize in German.
