f exposing the comic contradictions within his ideals and temperament (Crompton 89).
Tom Broadbent is the idealistic liberal who is the target of the humor in John Bull's Other Island. The play is seen as a dour comedy that is enlivened by broad caricature:
It depicts with a pungent blend of disgust and compassion the continuing conquest of Ireland by the British invader, specifically the conquest of an Irish village by an English land developer who plans to convert a bankrupt estate into a tourist resort (Valency 238-239).
Shaw does not create a simplistic vision in which the Irish are the good and downtrodden while the British are the overlords exploiting them for everything possible. For Shaw, both the English and the Irish emerge as scoundrels. What Shaw does in this play is criticize the sort of man he himself had been, for there is much of the immature Shaw in Tom Broadbent. Shaw did not create a character who was simply a caricature of the right wing in politics in order to make his liberal stance seem more palatable; instead, Shaw points up the foibles and failures of the liberal position as a criticism of why that position seems to e failing at the end of the nineteenth century:
I think Shaw chose to depict a Liberal and "a bit of a Unitarian" for the barb of his satire because he could fathom the pompousness of a Liberal with more self-knowledge than he could give to the pompousness of a Tory and a churchman (Smith 5).
Marx portrays the social classes and their struggles in more clear-cut terms than does Shaw. Marx argues that bourgeois society is a system of domination, with the bourgeoisie dominant over the proletariat. The economic system that is explained in this fashion came about with the
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