ON Saturday, January 7, 1967, the centenary year of John Galsworthy’s birth, the BBC broadcast the first episode of a lavish, 26-hour-long adaptation of The Forsyte Saga. The public reaction was so favourable that, little more than a year later, the series was repeated. The knock-on effect was a rise in the sales of Galsworthy’s books to levels not even reached at the height of his popularity in the 1920s. Suddenly, his reputation, after years on the slide, was on the rise again.
The amalgamation of three Galsworthy novels under the name (, and, published separately between 1906 and 1921, together with the short interludes and) and with one cover in 1922 had been a commercial success, but the author’s critical standing had taken several knocks since. D. H. Lawrence accused Galsworthy (1867–1933) of peddling ‘cheap cynicism smothered in sentimentalism’ and Virginia Woolf dubbed him ‘a stuffed shirt’ after his death.
