John Galsworthy

John Galsworthy was born on the 14th August 1867 on the family estate, Parkfield, in Kingston-upon-Thames. His family’s wealth came from the shipping industry

At age nine he began his education at Saugeen, a Bournemouth preparatory school, before moving to Harrow school in 1881, distinguishing himself as an athlete. 

Galsworthy attended New College, Oxford to read law and left with a second-class degree with honours in 1889. The bar called him in 1890 but Galsworthy decided he would rather run the family’s shipping business. This also meant travelling to destinations such as Vancouver, South Africa and Australia.

In 1895 Galsworthy began a decade long affair with Ada Nemesis Pearson Cooper, the wife of his first cousin. It was only when, in 1905, she divorced and married Galsworthy that their affair became known.

His literary career began in 1897 with a short story volume, ‘From the Four Winds’, with the pseudonym John Sinjohn as were three further works. Under his own name, in 1904, came ‘The Island Pharisees’, a novel of social observation, seasoned with flashes of satire and propaganda. He also switched from small, independent publishers to the larger Heinemann and to whom he remained for the duration of his career.

1906 saw first major play, ‘The Silver Box’, and the novel ‘The Man of Property’. Each to considerable acclaim. The latter was the first in ‘The Forsyte Saga’ trilogy written between 1906 and 1921. It dealt with the questions of status, class and materialism through Soames Forsyte, who is acutely aware of his ‘new money’ status. Jealous of his wife, his machinations drive her into the arms of another. Soames engages in a terrible revenge with terrible consequences. 

His social agenda was enlightened particularly in his condemnation over the use of solitary confinement in prisons, his attacks on theatrical censorship and campaigning for animal rights.

Galsworthy, having been passed over for active service, spent much of the First World War working as an orderly in a field hospital in France.

Despite his it was only in 1920 that he had his first blockbuster play ‘The Skin Game’, a melodrama dealing with ethics, property and class. 

In 1920 ‘In Chancery’ also arrived with further discourse on the marital disharmony between Soames Forsyte and his wife. 

The appreciation of his work gradually shifted from plays to novels, particularly through his detailing English social difference, tension and pretension with the Forsytes. A second trilogy, ‘A Modern Comedy’, followed, examining his love for his daughter Fleur and the English commercial upper-middle class, its ideologies and Soames’ poisonous materialism. 

Having rejected a knighthood in 1918 he was appointed, in 1929, to the Order of Merit. Galsworthy spent his last years writing a third Forsythe trilogy, ‘End of the Chapter’. 

In 1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize, but by now failing health meant he was too ill to attend the ceremony.

John Galsworthy died at his Hampstead home of a brain tumour on 31st January, 1933. He was cremated and his ashes scattered from an aeroplane over the South Downs.

Miniature Masterpieces

The Salvation of a Forsythe: "My doctor says I'm in a bad way, James"

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