Touches of Sweet, not so sweet, Henry Sweet 02

Another article on the probable model of Henry Higgins, the formidable Henry Sweet.

Although he belongs to the upper class, the character Henry Higgins does not show so often that well behaved manners of a gentleman. In "My Fair Lady", Higgins goes to his mother's box at Ascot horse race to ask her cooperation in testing Eliza's debut to the upper class. To Mrs. Higgins, her son's presence is "a disagreeable surprise"

Mrs. Higgnins

What a disagreeable surprise. Ascot is usually the one place I can come with my friends and not run the risk of seeing my son, Henry. Whenever my friends meet him, I never see them again.

From her words, we can see how easily Henry offends others.

Now, how about our Henry Sweet? There is an episode Shaw writes in his preface to "Pygmalion". Sweet was also a man who can easily get on the nerves of others.

Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor of a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of language and literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a phonetic expert only. The article, being libellous, had to be returned as impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of dragging its author into the limelight.

("Pygmalion" preface)

Shaw's big effort to bring the brilliant scholar into the limelight, it was flushed down the drain by the scholar by himself. Poor Shaw...