‘The Play All London is Discussing’: The Great Success of Guy du Maurier’s An Englishman’s Home, 1909

Guy du Maurier’s play An Englishman’s Home, first performed in January 1909 at Wyndham’s Theatre in London, has long been the subject of scholarly interest, if not concerted attention. Written by the lesser-known sibling of the famous du Maurier family, the production, in the words of The Times, “floated to notoriety on a wave of politics” (“Coming Theatrical Season”). By the end of its initial run at Wyndham’s in mid-June the play had been performed 161 times and watched by nearly 200,000 people (“Notes”). Theatre attendees included politicians and ministers, army officers and novelists, and even King Edward VII himself. Outside of the capital, touring production companies helped du Maurier’s creation achieve national and international acclaim, generating unprecedented levels of press coverage and political controversy along the way. A play about invasion that spoke to contemporary anxieties over Britain’s military strength and physical health, its popularity owed much to the introspective concerns that have come to define pre-1914 Britain (Powell; Trumble and Rager 2–9).

An Englishman’s Home has typically been approached by scholars as an example of Edwardian invasion and future-war literature, and as an important event in the contemporary debate surrounding compulsory military service (Clarke, Voices 126; Scully 109–19; Moon 398–407; Adams 53–74; Broad 14–18). The play has equally been considered through the concept of British militarism and as evidence of increasing Anglo-German antagonism (Eby; Whyte; Steiner and Neilson 44–83). Nicholas Hiley offers the most detailed analysis of the play, focusing in particular on its relationship with the Edwardian system of theatrical censorship. Similarly important is Jon Hegglund’s comparison of Howards End and An Englishman’s Home, in which both pieces are read as critiques of suburban life, and as indicative of the cultural value of “the home” in Edwardian Britain.

This comparatively small body of literature highlights that An Englishman’s Home has been glossed over in the wider historiography of the Edwardian era. Both classic studies and more recent survey works of pre-1914 Britain have, perhaps unsurprisingly, offered little detailed consideration of the play (Read 510–11; Searle, A New England 504). An explosion of interest in Edwardian culture in recent years, furthermore, has yielded little on du Maurier’s creation. This gap even exists in the field of theatre history, as key studies of the Edwardian theatre provide little insight on the great contemporary popularity of An Englishman’s Home. Despite often recognising that the Wyndham’s production “made history” (Macqueen-Pope 173), such works rarely award more than a few lines of analysis to du Maurier’s work (Trewin 151; Booth and Kaplan; O’Neill and Hatt). For a play that achieved major commercial success and recognition, this is clearly an aberration.

The most glaring absence of all is the lack of a detailed analysis on the popular reception of An Englishman’s Home. The play triggered an extraordinarily rich and diverse array of cultural and political responses. The sheer extent of these responses has only recently become apparent, thanks in part to the digitisation of a large proportion of major Edwardian newspapers and periodicals. Exploring a range of this large body of source material, this article will chase two lines of inquiry. Firstly, it will offer a detailed history of the circumstances surrounding the 1909 Wyndham’s production of An Englishman’s Home. This is a play that divided press opinion from its opening night, as reviewers struggled to decide whether it was a desperate warning or a clever satire. It was a production for which two endings were available, neither of which was universally considered satisfactory. An Englishman’s Home also inspired a significant number of imitators, from censored parodies and glowing tributes through to antagonistic theatrical alternatives. This history will highlight the significance of An Englishman’s Home as an event in its own right, or as numerous newspapers chose to describe it, as a “sign of the times” (“Wyndham’s Theatre” The Times).

The article...