Henry Arthur Jones

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 .