Henry Arthur Jones

Henry Arthur Jones left school at twelve for a draper's shop and became, with Arthur Wing Pinero, the dramatist who pulled the English stage back towards seriousness in the 1880s and 1890s. The Silver King, a melodrama written with Henry Herman in 1882, made him enough money to write what he liked. What he liked turned out to be plays about respectable people in difficulty: The Case of Rebellious Susan, in which a wronged wife considers doing as her husband has done; Dolly Reforming Herself; The Dancing Girl. He made the case for the theatre as an art form in the essays collected as The Renascence of the English Drama. Shaw and Ibsen then made him look cautious, and he spent his later years attacking both, along with H. G. Wells, in a series of pamphlets. He lived from 1851 to 1929.