Eliza Doolittle, the Galatea to Higgins' Pygmalion, is first encountered selling flowers outdoors. Shaw gives an elaborate description of her in his stage directions, describing her as dirty, shabby, and having bad teeth:
She is not at all an attractive person. She is perhaps eighteen... [her] hat... has long been exposed to the dust and soot of London and has seldom if ever been brushed. Her hair needs washing rather badly ... she is very...
Eliza Doolittle, the Galatea to Higgins' Pygmalion, is first encountered selling flowers outdoors. Shaw gives an elaborate description of her in his stage directions, describing her as dirty, shabby, and having bad teeth:
She is not at all an attractive person. She is perhaps eighteen... [her] hat... has long been exposed to the dust and soot of London and has seldom if ever been brushed. Her hair needs washing rather badly ... she is very dirty.
Shaw adds, though, that her features are actually no less regular than those of the ladies but the main difference in their appearance really has to do with class. Eliza's poverty does not allow her to engage in the sort of personal hygiene habits common among the upper classes and her clothing suffers from her earning her living selling flowers on the street. Shaw also attempts to reproduce her dialect phonetically, emphasizing the great distance between her cockney accent and standard pronunciation.
While the mother and daughter regard her as a nuisance to be paid off, Higgins is simply interested in her speech patterns and sees her as more of an object of scientific curiosity than as a human being. The bystanders tend to be sympathetic to her plight as they can see that she is struggling to support herself by selling flowers.
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