Laurence Housman

Laurence Housman (born July 18, 1865, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, Eng.—died Feb. 20, 1959, Glastonbury, Somerset) was an English artist and writer who reached his widest public with a series of plays about the Victorian era, of which the most successful was Victoria Regina (1934). A younger brother of the poet A.E. Housman, he studied art in London.

Among Housman’s earliest works were illustrations for Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems. His first writings were fairy tales and poems, which he illustrated himself. His first play, Bethlehem, was privately produced by Gordon Craig in 1902 but, like many of his dramatic works, was for some years withheld by censorship from public performance. Prunella (1906), a charming fantasy in which Harley Granville-Barker collaborated, escaped this fate. It was not, however, until 1922 that Housman again became prominent, with the publication of the first of three collections entitled Little Plays of St. Francis. The Victorian historical piece Angels and Ministers had appeared in 1921, and in 1922 Dethronements. Victoria Regina was staged in the United States with great success before it was licensed in England in 1937. The note of satire that in varying degrees pervaded much of his writing was dominant in the novel Trimblerigg (1924), of which David Lloyd George was the thinly disguised butt.