Henry Festing Jones

Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher Henry Festing Jones

Henry Festing Jones (1851-1928) was an English solicitor and writer, known as the friend and posthumous biographer of Samuel Butler. In 1910 Jones met Francis Darwin, in an attempt to give closure to the feud between Butler and Charles Darwin that had arisen around 1880; there resulted his pamphlet Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler: A Step toward Reconciliation (1911). Jones published a well-regarded selection The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), after Desmond MacCarthy had seen the originals, and published extracts in the New Quarterly Review. The editing of this work has been seen as involving false emphasis and polishing of the originals, producing an effect of a "cross between Oscar Wilde and Dr Johnson". His biography of Butler, entitled Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835-1902) - A Memoir, won the inaugural James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography in 1919. Jones edited Butler's works with Augustus Theodore Bartholomew, known as Theo and a librarian and bibliographer in Cambridge, in 20 volumes appearing 1923-6. On Bartholomew's death in 1933, Geoffrey Keynes became his literary executor, taking on also the papers of Jones and Butler, acting with Brian Hill.