W.S. Gilbert: Writerly Beginnings
What is to become of me? Am I destined to revolutionize the art of comic writing? Am I the man who is destined to write the burlesques and extravaganzas of the future? Are managers of theaters and editors of light literature doomed to fall prostrate at my feet in humble obeisance? Is it to me that society at large must look for amusement for the next (say) forty years? To these questions I unhesitatingly reply, “I am! They are! It is!”
– William S. Gilbert, writing as “A Trembling Beginner,” in The Art of Parody, Fun (9 Sept 1865)
In 1861, W.S. Gilbert was a 25-year-old clerk in the Education Department, a dead-end job he hated. But thanks to a bequest of £300 from his relative, was able to escape that “10 to 4 drudgery.” He put most of the money toward a future career as a barrister, but he also bought a quire of paper, some pens and a few wood blocks. Gilbert’s goal was to be a writer for the comic papers.
He was a self-taught artist, and learned to draw his little caricatures and figures onto a prepared woodblock, which, when engraved, would produce the black-and-white line drawings for the publication.
In the autumn of 1861, he submitted a poem, “Satisfied Isaiah Jones,” to a publication called Good Words. The editor thought it was funny, but too long, and so rejected it. But Gilbert persisted. Next, he wrote an article that was three-quarters of a column long, created a half-page drawing on a wood block to accompany it, and submitted them both to a new comic magazine called Fun.
The editor of Fun, H. J. Byron, liked what he saw. He asked Gilbert to contribute a weekly column and a half-page drawing every week. Amazed, Gilbert later wrote, “I hardly knew how to treat the offer, for it seemed to me that into that short article I had poured all I knew. I was empty. I had exhausted myself; I didn’t know any more.”
He signed himself, “Our Used-Up Contributor.”
This feeling that he had run out of ideas stayed with Gilbert all his life – throughout that first decade when his writing ranged from burlesques, to squibs, fillers, short articles, drama criticism and topical essays, to his marvelous collection of poems called The Bab Ballads, and later to plays both dramatic and comedic, all the way to the librettos of the brilliant comic operas he co-authored with Arthur Sullivan.
This fear, Gilbert said, “invariably haunts me… on the completion of every work involving a sustained effort. At first, it used to scare me, but I have long learnt to recognize it as a mere bogey, and to treat it with the contempt it deserves.”
According to biographer Jane Stedman, this feeling came about because of Gilbert’s intense concentration on each work as he wrote it. In writing a play, he would “eat that piece and drink that piece and exude that piece, and identify myself altogether with that piece,” he once wrote to a friend.
Perhaps, in those early years of his writing career, the many pseudonyms he wrote under helped to bring him new ideas when he felt exhausted – at Fun, he wrote as The Comic Physiognomist, The Comic Mythologist, A. Dapter, Desiderius Erasmus, A Trembling Widow, R. Ditty, A. Pittite, Animal Carraccio, R. Chimedes, and Snarler.
So here is a question for you, Dear Reader: When you feel that you’ve run out of ideas, what do you do? Leave a comment and tell me how you refill your creative well.
