While John Galsworthy is most famous for The Forsyte Saga, a series of novels, he was also a prolific playwright. “His theatrical career gave him a profile that fiction alone could never achieve, for it put him at the forefront of an intellectual and social movement – the very place where he wanted to be…The ‘theater of ideas’, spearheaded by socially conscious writers such as Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, was putting serious debate onto the stage, sweeping away the drawing room comedies of the recent plays. Stage plays were still censored (they would remain so, despite the efforts of Galsworthy and a few others, until 1968), and it was difficult to introduce anything really contentious into popular drama.”

“The Silver Box was the story of two men, one rich, one poor; in trouble with the law for much the same misdemeanor and traced the disparity in their fate. Strife (1909) tackled industrial relations, and Justice, later the same year, protested against the inhumanities of the penal system. On stage, Galsworthy was more argumentative, more propagandist; he reserved his dissection of the subtleties of life for his novels."

Galsworthy was successful in impacting social change. He adopted numerous other cause including women’s suffrage. We’ll see some of his views on this topic in The Man of Property.

Source: The Forsyte Saga – The Official Companion by Rupert Smith, 2002