John Galsworthy was one of the great British writers of the early 20th century, and won a Nobel Prize for his work. Galsworthy was a dramatist of considerable technical skill. His plays often took up specific social grievances such as the double standard of justice as applied to the upper and lower classes; and the confrontation of capital and labor.
Galsworthy's reaction to the First World War found its expression in The Mob (1914), in which the voice of a statesman is drowned in the madness of the war-hungry masses. The Pigeon also discloses to us the inadequacy of charity, individual and organized, to cope with poverty, as well as the absurdity of reformers and experimenters who attempt to patch up effects while they ignore the causes.