Aet. 40, to a journalist and playwright. In the Pelican (27 February 1892, page 317), Sims offered “to give £100 if Grein [of the Independent Theater Society] produces original play of his own. Another £100 if George Moore does ditto.”
The challenge came in a series of articles in the Pelican on contemporary journalists. The second in the series, (30 January 1892, page 253) was about George Moore: “While in Paris he wrote his first comedy. It was called Worldliness. It has never been produced. Thought it very bad then. Does not think so now.”
In the Pelican (5 March 1892, page 333), George accepted Sims’s challenge, stating: “It shall be unconventional; that is, it shall be a psychological play, and in both subject and treatment be the sort of a play which a manager, running his theatre on commercial lines, would, in all human probability, reject, as having no money in it.”
In the Pelican (12 March 1892), in a letter dated 7 March 1892, Sims stipulated that George’s play must have three acts, be performed before the leading dramatists of London, and be entirely original.
George responded in the Pelican (26 March 1892, page 380), insisting that “no man who respected himself ought to describe his own work as either ‘new’, or ’original’, or ’unconventional’” — though his play would be.
The Strike at Arlingford was promised for October 1892; it was staged by the Independent Theatre Society in February 1893.
