Higgins tells Pickering that he could pass off the flower girl as a duchess merely by teaching her to speak properly. It soon becomes apparent that he and Colonel Pickering have a shared interest in phonetics indeed, Pickering has come from India to meet Higgins, and Higgins was planning to go to India to meet Pickering. Eliza worries that Higgins is a police officer and will not calm down until Higgins introduces himself. The man is Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics. While Eliza tries to sell flowers to the Colonel, a bystander informs her that a man is writing down everything she says. Shortly they are joined by a gentleman, Colonel Pickering. Her flowers drop into the mud of Covent Garden, the flowers she needs to survive in her poverty-stricken world. Clara’s brother Freddy enters having earlier been dispatched to secure them a cab (which they can ill-afford), but being rather timid and faint-hearted he has failed to do so.Īs he goes off once again to find a cab, he bumps into a flower girl, Eliza.

Among them are the Eynsford-Hills, superficial social climbers eking out a living in “genteel poverty”, consisting initially of Mrs. A group of people are sheltering from the rain. Neither the Gutenberg edition referenced throughout this page nor the Wikisource text linked below contain these sequences.Īct One ‘Portico of Saint Paul’s Church (not Wren’s Cathedral but Inigo Jones Church in Covent Garden vegetable market)’ – 11. The others are the scene at the Embassy Ball in Act Three and the scene with Eliza and Freddy in Act Four.

Pygmalion play by george bernard shaw