The film is taken loosely from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's long poem, Enoch Arden, published in 1864. The 15 January 1916 Moving Picture World called it "a burlesque of the well-known Tennyson story."
       Filming took place between 12 October and 24 December 1915, and was finished and shipped on 6 January 1916.
       The 15 January 1916 Moving Picture World and release charts in Motography listed the film as a two-reeler, but all other sources, including the copyright catalog and the 4 March 1916 Motion Picture News, listed it at four or five reels. Most likely the picture was trimmed down to two reels. The 5 February 1916 Moving Picture World praised the film as "so crowded with sensational incidents that it makes lurid melodrama pale at times," because "the producers had worn themselves out in the effort to extend a three-reel story to larger dimensions....One incident convulsed the entire audience at its first showing, that of Joe Jackson as the returned Enoch Arden and the child, a little girl, at the edge of a brook. While he is leaning over the water, she extracts a full whiskey flask from his hip pocket, tastes it, makes a grimace as she goes a few feet up stream, and then pours it into the water just as he is scooping it up to drink. He tastes the liquor in the stream and imagines that he has discovered a river of it with consequences to be imaged."
       A Triangle advertisement, which ran in the 22 January 1916 Motion Picture News, described vaudevillian Joe Jackson as "probably the best known tramp on the stage." Others sources referred to the Austrian-born performer as "the tramp comedian" and "tramp cyclist." His five comedies for Keystone in 1915-1916 are his total film output.
       Dora Rodgers, born Dorothy Rodgers, was better known after 1918 as Fontaine La Rue. Her last name was sometimes spelled Rogers in reviews.
       Universal released a three-reel film called A Modern Enoch Arden in May 1915, according to lists in Motography and Motion Picture News.
       D. W. Griffith produced a 1908 Biograph film called After Many Years (see entry), based on the same source. Its working title was A Modern Enoch Arden. Griffith also wrote the script for a Majestic Motion Picture Co. film called Enoch Arden (1915, see entry); child actress Betty Marsh also appeared in the same role in that film. After A Modern Enoch Arden, Betty reappeared with Joe Jackson in his next film, a short called Gypsy Joe.
       The National Film Preservation Board (NFPB) included this film on its list of Lost U.S. Silent Feature Films as of February 2021.
       Production dates and the working title were taken from Brent E. Walker's authoritative Mack Sennett's Fun Factory (McFarland & Co., 2010), based on microfilmed Keystone/New York Motion Picture Co. records in the Harry Aitken Papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, WI.
       For more information about the Keystone Film Co., see The Water Nymph (1912).