Henry Arthur Jones

Henry Arthur Jones (20 September 1851 – 7 January 1929) was an English dramatist, who was first noted for his melodrama The Silver King (1882), and went on to write prolifically, often appearing to mirror Ibsen from the opposite (conservative) viewpoint. As a right-winger, he engaged in extensive debates with left-wing writers such as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells.

Biography

Jones was born at Granborough, Buckinghamshire, to Silvanus Jones, a farmer. Until he was 13, he attended Grace's Classical and Commercial Academy in Winslow, where he inherited property on his father's death in 1914. He began to earn his living early, his spare time being given to literary pursuits.

Career overview

He was twenty-seven before his first piece, It's Only Round the Corner, was produced at the Exeter Theatre, but within four years of his debut as a dramatist he scored a great success with The Silver King (November 1882), written with Henry Herman, a melodrama produced by Wilson Barrett at the Princess's Theatre, London. Its financial success enabled the author to write a play "to please himself".

Saints and Sinners (1884), which ran for two hundred nights, placed on the stage a picture of middle-class life and religion in a country town, and the introduction of the religious element raised considerable outcry. The author defended himself in an article published in the Nineteenth Century (January 1885), taking for his starting-point a quotation from the preface to Molière's Tartuffe. His next serious pieces, The Middleman (1889) and Judah (1890), established his reputation.