Galsworthy, who liked to regard himself as a Devon man, felt more at home at Manaton than did his wife Ada, who missed London life. His short story The Apple Tree, based on the local Dartmoor legend of Kitty Jay, suggests both the passion he felt for things Dartmoor and his ultimate reluctant need to return to London. The Oxford-educated hero of The Apple Tree chooses the middle-class Stella over the peasant Megan, but is haunted by a profound sense of guilt and regret. In the midst of his public success, Galsworthy died thinking his work a failure. Galsworthy is remembered best as a novelist, but he made his name as a playwright arguing for social reform, one of the angry young men of the Edwardian London stage, and his plays were well enough known for T.S. Eliot writing in 1924 to refer to English drama ‘from Kyd to Galsworthy’. He espoused may social and political causes, including slum clearance, a minimum wage, reforms in the divorce law and prison system, votes for women, improvements in slaughter houses and better working conditions for ponies in mines, although later in life he became rather more conservative. He died in North London in 1933.
Galsworthy’s first play was The Silver Box, produced at the Court Theatre in London (now the Royal Court) in 1906 (Galsworthy, 1931). It was a play of ideas, in the tradition of Ibsen and Shaw, and set the tone for his dramatic output of 19 full-length plays, notably Strife,Justice, Loyalties and Escape. Perhaps it is significant that his one play overtly1 about Dartmoor is called Escape, first performed at the Ambassadors Theatre, London, in the summer of 1926. It was a huge commercial success and ran for a year. Ostensibly Escapeis a humorous thriller about the escape from Dartmoor Prison of a man whose only crime has been to protect a prostitute from wrongful arrest. At a deeper level, through a series of encounters between the escaped prisoner and people going about their lives on Dartmoor, the play proceeds to argue how rebellion against the edicts of authority, even where those edicts are wrong, causes such disruption to the lives of innocent bystanders that its pursuit eventually becomes morally intolerable.