Dalrymple’s newest post at his Salisbury Review blog discusses something new to me: the Fabian stained glass window at the London School of Economics. Designed by George Bernard Shaw to consecrate the Fabian program, it’s as creepy and disturbing as you might expect (see it here). Even more so, it didn’t seem to bother Tony Blair or the media at all when it was reinstalled.
The window depicts the Fabians in mediaeval costume remaking the world. The early historian of the movement, E. R. Pease, squeezes some bellows in a forge, while Sidney Webb wields an enormous mallet to a red hot globe and Shaw helps him. The scene contains the Fabian’s coat of arms: a wolf in sheep’s clothing…
Underneath the reforging of the world by Shaw and Webb, early Fabians were depicted praying to a pile of books. Among them are Fabian Essays (edited and contributed to by Shaw) and several volumes of his own plays. Shaw’s works had become holy, at least in his own estimate.