Henry Arthur Jones

Henry Arthur Jones was an English dramatist.Jones was born at Granborough, 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 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 piece was The Middleman (1889), followed by Judah (1890), both powerful plays, which established his reputation.