Henry Arthur Jones
| Henry Arthur Jones | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
20 September 1851 Granborough, Winslow, Buckinghamshire |
| Died | 7 January 1929 (aged 77) Hampstead |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | dramatist |
Henry Arthur Jones (20 September 1851 – 7 January 1929) was an English dramatist.
Jones was born at Granborough, Winslow, 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.
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.
His plays have been performed 28 times on Broadway, the most recent in 1928 (Mrs Dane's Defence).
A uniform edition of his plays began to be issued in 1891. His views of dramatic art were expressed from time to time in lectures and essays, collected in 1895 as The Renaissance of the English Drama.
"There are three rules for writing plays," said Oscar Wilde. "The first rule is not to write like Henry Arthur Jones; the second and third rules are the same." This comic belittling is prompted by Wilde's aloof attitude in distancing himself from the foibles of the middle and higher classes, as opposed to Jones' method of realistic observations (from his viewpoint) on the way ordinary people act, though mainly emphasizing faults and weaknesses.
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