he has gleaned from a gathering of this family — no branch of which had a liking for the other,

It's the birthday of novelist John Galsworthy, born in Kingston upon Thames, England (1867). He was the son of a wealthy lawyer — everyone expected him to follow in his father's footsteps. He studied law at Oxford, but decided that life as a lawyer was not for him; so he took off traveling, sailing all over the world. In 1893, he was on a ship sailing from Australia to South Africa when he struck up a friendship with the first mate, who happened to be the novelist Joseph Conrad. Conrad still identified as a sailor, but he had begun working on his first novel, Almayer's Folly, which would be published two years later. The two men became close friends, and even though Galsworthy had never considered writing before, his conversations with Conrad inspired him to give up any pretense at a future in law and become a writer instead.

Galsworthy published his first short stories and novels under a pseudonym, John Sinjohn. After seven years of publishing, he finally began using his own name when he published The Island Pharisees (1904), a scathing criticism of the upper-class British society into which he had been born.

He is most famous for his series The Forsyte Saga, which includes three novels and two "interludes": The Man of Property (1906), Indian Summer of a Forsyte (1918), In Chancery (1920), Awakening (1920), and To Let (1921). He followed up The Forsyte Saga with two sequels, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter, both of which contained numerous books themselves. The major characters recur throughout the series: greedy Soames; his unhappy and beautiful wife, Irene [pronounced "I-ree-nee"]; Soames's cousin, Young Jolyon, whom Irene marries in the third book; young Jolyon's second wife, the French governess Helene, who helps him break free from the oppressive snobbery of his family; young Jolyon's daughter from a first marriage, June, and her fiancé, an architect named Philip Bosinney, who has an affair with Irene; old Jolyon, who falls in love with Irene like just about everyone else and leaves her all of his money; and many nephews, cousins, granddaughters, etc.

Galsworthy also wrote 31 full-length plays, many of which were popular at the time, including Justice (1910), The Skin Game (1920), and Loyalties (1922). He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1932, and the Nobel committee claimed that the prize was awarded to Galsworthy "for his distinguished art of narration, which takes its highest form in The Forsyte Saga."

In 1967, the BBC adapted The Forsyte Saga and A Modern Comedy into a 26-part series for its relatively new channel, BBC2. BBC executives hadn't really wanted to make the series — it was expensive to film, and they didn't think a costume drama would appeal to hip 1960s viewers. But they needed something to boost the BBC2's ratings and they finally decided to give The Forsyte Saga a try. It was surprisingly popular — the BBC2 channel was only available to 8 million people, and 6 million of them watched the series. So they aired it again on BBC1 in 1968, at which point it was so popular that pubs stopped serving and churches stopped holding evening services during the episodes on Sunday nights. An estimated 18 million people watched the final episode in 1968, and overall, 165 million people worldwide watched the series.

John Galsworthy wrote: "Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight — an upper middle-class family in full plumage. ... In plainer words, he has gleaned from a gathering of this family — no branch of which had a liking for the other, between no three members of whom existed anything worthy of the name of sympathy — evidence of that mysterious concrete tenacity which renders a family so formidable a unit of society, so clear a reproduction of society in miniature."