English Morality — The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, ‘The Turn of the Screw’

Abstract

When James, after the failure of Guy Domville in 1895, withdrew from his attempt to conquer the London stage, he felt he had been brought face to face with some very ugly aspects of English life. The audience, for example, had made more of a spectacle of itself than the cast. The popular element in the theatre had, with ‘malice prepense’, openly sided with the villain of the piece, Lord Devenish, and had failed to appreciate Guy, the last of the Domvilles, James’s renunciatory hero. When he took his author’s curtain-call, James found himself at the centre of a storm of derision and applause which was more than just critical, but moral. ‘All the forces of civilization in the house’, he wrote to his brother, ‘waged a battle of the most gallant, prolonged and sustained applause with the hoots and jeers and catcalls of the roughs, whose roars (like those of a cage of beasts at some infernal “zoo”) were only exacerbated (as it were!) by the conflict.’¹⁰⁵