Henry Arthur Jones
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Henry Arthur Jones (28 September 1851-1929) was an English dramatist.
Jones was born at Grandborough, Buckinghamshire to Silvanus Jones, a farmer. He began to earn his living early, his spare time being given to literary pursuits. He was twenty-seven before his first piece, 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 by The Silver King (November 1882), written with Henry Herman, a melodrama produced by Wilson Barrett at the Princess's Theatre. 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 piece was The Middleman (1889), followed by Judah (1890), both powerful plays, which established his reputation.
Later plays were
- The Dancing Girl (1891),
- The Crusaders (1891),
- The Bauble Shop (1892?),
- The Tempter (1893),
- The Masqueraders (1894),
- The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894),
- The Triumph of the Philistines (1895),
- Michael and his Lost Angel (1896),
- The Rogue's Comedy (1896),
- The Physician (1897),
- The Liars (1897),
- Carnac Sahib (1899),
- The Manoeuvres of Jane (1899),
- The Lackeys' Carnival (1900),
- Mrs Dane's Defence (1900),
- The Princess's Nose (1902),
- Chance the Idol (1902),
- Whitewashing Julia (1903),
- Joseph Entangled (1904),
- The Chevalier (1904),
A uniform edition of his plays began to be issued in 1891; and his own views of dramatic art have been expressed from time to time in lectures and essays, collected in 1895 as The Renascence of the English Drama.