Pygmalion

Character Guide

Spoiler-free — fuller detail (with spoilers, if you want them) lives in the reader's Guide tab.

Eliza Doolittle (Liza, the flower girl)

A poor young flower seller with a strong Cockney accent, encountered in Covent Garden in the rain. She approaches Higgins for speech lessons so she can get work in a proper flower shop.

Henry Higgins (The Note Taker, Professor Higgins)

A brilliant, blunt, and self-absorbed phonetics expert who boasts he can transform Eliza's speech enough to pass her off as a duchess. He is impatient, careless of others' feelings, and wholly absorbed in his scientific work.

Colonel Pickering

A courteous gentleman and fellow phonetics enthusiast (author of 'Spoken Sanscrit') who moves in with Higgins and funds the wager, treating Eliza with consistent respect and kindness.

Alfred Doolittle

Eliza's father, a dustman with a colorful, philosophical way of talking about morality who shows up looking for money once he learns his daughter is living with Higgins.

Mrs. Pearce

Higgins's housekeeper, practical and protective, who insists on proper standards of behavior and language being used around Eliza.

Mrs. Higgins

Henry Higgins's mother, a socially astute woman who is skeptical of her son's scheme and concerned about its effect on Eliza.

Freddy Eynsford Hill

A pleasant, somewhat ineffectual young gentleman from a genteel but impoverished family, first seen sheltering from the rain near Eliza in Covent Garden.

Mrs. Eynsford Hill

Freddy's mother, well-bred but anxious about the family's straitened finances.

Clara Eynsford Hill

Freddy's sister, who affects a fashionable, at-ease society manner despite the family's genteel poverty.

Glossary

Kerbstone English

Higgins's dismissive term for Eliza's lower-class Cockney dialect, seen as marking her permanently as a member of the gutter class.

Note Taker

Higgins's initial anonymous role in Act I, referring to his habit of phonetically transcribing people's speech in the street.

Phonetics

The scientific study of speech sounds; Higgins's profession and obsession, used as the tool for Eliza's transformation.

Duchess/garden party wager

The central bet: that Higgins can teach Eliza to speak and behave so well she could pass as nobility at an ambassador's reception.

At-home

A period social custom where a hostess receives visitors in her home on a set day; the setting for Eliza's first trial appearance in society.

Undeserving poor

Alfred Doolittle's self-descriptive term, part of his satirical argument that conventional charity unfairly favors the 'deserving' poor over people like himself.

Tanner / half-a-crown / bob

British slang and coin denominations of the period (a tanner = sixpence, half-a-crown = two shillings sixpence) used in Eliza's haggling as a flower girl.

Billet-doux

French for 'love letter,' used ironically by Pickering to describe a piece of Higgins's mail.

Squashed cabbage leaf

Higgins's insulting description of Eliza in her original unrefined state, later echoed by Eliza herself with bitter irony.

Pygmalion myth

The Greek legend of a sculptor who falls in love with the statue he carves, brought to life by a goddess; Shaw's title alludes to and subverts this story of a creator and his creation.

Open the full interactive Guide in the reader →