Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Houghton, William Stanley
HOUGHTON, WILLIAM STANLEY (1881–1913), dramatist, the only son of John Hartley Houghton, a Manchester merchant, was born at Ashton-upon-Mersey, Cheshire, 22 February 1881. A random education ended in 1897 with a year at the Manchester grammar school; and Houghton went at once into his father's warehouse, knowing that for many years the dramatic ambition which he cherished would not provide him with a livelihood. From 1897 to 1912 the selling of ‘grey cloth’ occupied him eight hours a day; what remained was devoted to literature and drama with a determination and confidence which Mr. Max Beerbohm's caricature distorts into Olympian conceit. From 1900 play-making and acting were Houghton's absorbing hobby: in 1905–1906 he was unpaid dramatic critic for the Manchester City News; between August 1905 and April 1913 he contributed seventeen ‘back-page’ articles and more than a hundred theatrical notices and literary reviews to the Manchester Guardian. His public career as a dramatist began with the performance of The Dear Departed on 2 November 1908 at the Gaiety, the Manchester repertory theatre, then in its second winter. By the autumn of 1912 the success of Hindle Wakes assured Houghton that without undue risk he could desert cotton for drama. He left Manchester for London; but finding it impossible to work there, in 1913 he settled in Paris, where he wrote the extant six chapters of his novel, Life. In the summer a mysterious illness, which had threatened for some time, overtook him at Venice. He was brought back an invalid to Manchester, where he died 11 December 1913. He never married. In February 1915 a memorial tablet was unveiled in the Manchester reference library.
Mr. H. Brighouse's edition of Houghton's Works (1914) gives everything which is accessible in print. It omits all the early experiments (i.e. before 1908) except The Old Testament and the New (1905, presented at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, in August 1914); the rest are still in MS., and none of these have been professionally acted. Of the plays written in and after 1908, Mr. Brighouse omits only three: Ginger (written 1910, performed 1913), and a sketch and a play, Pearls and Trust the People, which were written, with Phipps, on Arthur Bourchier's commission in 1912. These three have never been printed: Ginger and Pearls have a purely theatrical virtue, and Trust the People is an admitted failure. The public stage has seen all the plays written from 1908 onwards, except Marriages in the Making (1909) and Partners (1911), a three-act elaboration of the one-act Fancy-Free. Hindle Wakes was first produced at the Aldwych Theatre, London, in June 1912 by Miss A. E. F. Horniman's company at the invitation of the Stage Society; the earlier of the acted plays had their premières at the Manchester Gaiety Theatre, The Dear Departed in 1908, Independent Means in 1909, The Younger Generation and The Master of the House in 1910, and Fancy-Free in 1911.
The first, but not the finest, of Houghton's dramatic gifts is cleverness, and naturally it is most obvious in his technique. At the outset he divined the method most suited to his range of interests, and from The Dear Departed little but adaptation to larger issues was necessary. Learning, through the less compatible matter of Independent Means and Marriages in the Making, the dramatic limitations and the theatrical virtues of his art, he attained almost complete technical success in The Younger Generation and absolute mastery in the first act of Hindle Wakes. In the intervening plays his cleverness is patent in more equivocal qualities. He appropriates Shaw, he adapts St. John Hankin, he echoes Wilde, and unfortunately with an adroitness that belongs less to his genius than to his besetting sin, mere showmanship. Yet he is much more than a competent artisan. At its best, his technique is dramatic, and not merely theatrical: mere technique is plainly inadequate to account for the structural harmony of person, setting, incident, and idiom which gives to the first act of Hindle Wakes the relentless inevitability of supreme drama. It is ‘action’ in the most rigid dramatic sense, isolated from all moral and intellectual values, complete in itself, and moving only by its own momentum.
Naturally, Houghton is influenced strongly by Ibsen: but his Ibsenism differs from other English varieties. Apart from Independent Means, he wrote no propagandist plays; his lack of vital interest in social and political problems freed his dramatic action from their constraint. Like Ibsen, he was led to concern himself with a narrow society, the nexus of which he saw in a simple convention; for Houghton, the simpler the better. He showed it, again like Ibsen, purely in its human aspect before it had been resolved into a sociological problem. If the end of a play provides no solution that a sociologist would accept, it is partly because Houghton lacks Ibsen's penetrating imagination, but also because he preferred an issue too elemental for solution. The antipathy of age and youth is the only problem which Houghton deliberately faces as such; the more fashionable dramatic problem of sex is taken without prejudice into the mise-en-scène, rather than developed in the theme, of Hindle Wakes.
The attempt of the Gaiety Theatre to rear a local drama inspired Houghton to his best use of the Ibsen tradition. It limited him to material dramatically similar to Ibsen's, and it involved such preoccupation with manners as to exclude problematic abstractions. It diverted, of course, the Ibsen tradition toward comedy, but circumstances corrected the bias. The Manchester school of dramatists might caricature Lancashire for a London audience; but in Manchester it had to show the inside of a Lancashire house to its occupants, and the Lancashire nature to itself. The Dear Departed is local only in its manners, customs, and speech. The Younger Generation claims to depict a local creed, but as contempt for the creed creates all the fun of the piece, its professors have only a limited humanity. Hindle Wakes is in the main so truly local that it is universal; its interest is in human nature as it lives in Lancashire. It has glaring faults, and the whole is certainly less than the part. But its two old men are great figures; as Houghton created them, his sympathy got the better of his prejudices and cleverness, and imposed on his imagination the severe economy which his developed technique is most potent to express. As a result, Hindle Wakes is a great play; in promise, indeed, the greatest of our time.
[H. Brighouse's memoir in the Works cited; the Manchester Guardian, 1905–1913 passim; private information.]