JOHN GALSWORTHY'S JUSTICE

Abstract

It has been widely acknowledged in the various biographies of John Galsworthy (1867-1933), the Edwardian novelist and dramatist (Marrott 1935; Barker 1963; Dupre 1976; Frechet 1982; Gindin 1987), and increasingly in the penal reform litera ture (Radzinowicz and Hood 1986; Forsythe 1990) that his play, Justice (1910), had a small but direct impact on penal decision making in this period. Written (in part) to highlight the evils of separate confinement in the prison system it numbered the then Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, and the then Chairman of the Prison Commis sion, Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, in its first-night audience and influenced the decision later that year to reduce the period spent by prisoners in such confinement. This much is understood. But Galsworthy's penal interests, and his eventual impact, were greater and more diffuse than this. He was not formally a criminologist (see Garland 1994: 45-6 for the range of occupations to which this term could be applied in this period), but Justice was the highpoint of a period in which he mastered key elements of contemporary debate on the causes of crime and the means by which it might be controlled, and, by dint of his social and literary status, presented them to both the public and to government with an authority that they would not otherwise have had. It is the purpose of this article to examine the 'criminological milieu' in which Galsworthy's ideas and campaign developed, and to explore the artifice of his play in more detail than previous accounts have done, in order to explore the role of the 'man of letters' as a contributor to penal sensibilities. The decline in Galsworthy's literary reputation after his death and the received, though now convincingly contested (Gindin 1987), view of him as an essentially con servative, middle-rank writer whose only claim to fame is the nine-volume Forsyte Saga (which chronicled the decline of the Edwardian middle classes to which he belonged) is not of concern to us here. It is important to emphasize that in the early years of the twentieth century this is not at all how he was perceived, as even George Orwell, who was himself scathing about the later Galsworthy, conceded: