Arthur Sullivan: Early Success and Early Heartbreak

(Note: Sorry for the delay in posting this week’s blog — I finished a free short story, which you can read here.)

Everybody liked Arthur Sullivan. Good looking, charming, funny, smart, superbly talented. How could they not?

Men liked him and women fell in love with him. According to Hesketh Pearson, author of Gilbert and Sullivan, “With women his appeal was immediate and often permanent. His oval, olive-tinted face, his dark luminous eyes, his large sensuous mouth, and the generous crop of black curly hair which overhung his low forehead, no doubt added to the attraction.”

But despite all this, Arthur Sullivan’s first serious love affair ended in heartbreak.

Michael Ainger, in his book Gilbert and Sullivan: A Dual Biography, explains that in 1866, Sullivan was part of a group of friends called the Moray Minstrels, who gathered at Moray Lodge, Campton Hill, at the home of Arthur Lewis. They liked to put on amateur theatricals.

One member of the group, a writer named Frank Burnand (later the editor of Punch magazine) suggested to Sullivan that they should write something together. Sullivan agreed, and Burnand set to work adapting the farce “Box and Cox”, a story about two men who never met, even though they shared the same room in a boarding house—and, as it turned out, the same girlfriend.

Burnand called his effort Cox and Box, and it had just three characters: Box, who worked all day; Cox, who worked all night; and Sgt. Bouncer, the landlord who rented them the same room. When one of the two lodgers gets the day off work, hijinks ensue.

Sullivan wrote a number of clever songs for the piece, including a lovely lullaby to a rasher of bacon that one man sings as his dinner cooks quietly on the stove. You can hear it here. At first, he only wrote out the vocal parts, because he was playing the music on the piano himself.

On Wednesday, 23 May 1866, Cox and Box was performed for the first time for the Moray Minstrels. The friends who played the characters included the popular Punch cartoonist George du Maurier in the role of Box. This amateur performance was such a success that later Cox and Box was turned into a complete one-act comic opera with orchestration by Sullivan.

But during this time, Sullivan was falling in love. Her name was Rachel Scott Russell.

Rachel Scott Russell was the daughter of John Scott Russell, a wealthy and socially prominent engineer. She and Sullivan had known one another since 1863 when Sullivan was 21 and she was 18. Although on friendly terms with the whole family, no one expected anything to come of their friendship.

Rachel and Arthur’s relationship turned serious and intimate around the time of the amateur performance. However, they did not tell her parents.

In May of 1867, the first public performance of Cox and Box took place at the Adelphi Theater. It was a success. William S. Gilbert reviewed the comic opera for the magazine Fun, and wrote in part:

“Mr. Sullivan’s music is, in many places, of too high a class for the grotesquely absurd plot to which it is wedded.”

(History records that Burnand never liked Gilbert too much.)

When Rachel told her parents that she wanted to marry Sullivan, her mother, a baronet’s daughter, absolutely forbade it. Sullivan was poor, and at that time he made very little money – he survived by selling sheet music, playing the church organ on Sundays, and teaching. His serious compositions brought in critical acclaim but not much financial reward.

Rachel and Arthur continued to write to one another and to meet in secret, but their tumultuous love affair was marred by jealousy and misunderstandings. Rachel expected Arthur to put her ahead of his music. At one point, she wanted him to put his musical career aside and work in a bank to make enough money to satisfy her parents so that they could get married.

But Arthur’s career as an artist and musician was more important to him, and his priorities caused a lot of stress in their relationship. However, since she had “given herself” to him, she felt that they must eventually marry. Arthur could not find a way to break off their relationship, and the affair limped along until 1870, when it was finally broken off.

Rachel’s letters to Sullivan survive, although she burnt his letters to her at his request. In one of her last letters to him, she returned his ring and wrote,

“You have others to work for & your beautiful genius to work for—& I—nor any other woman on God’s earth—is worth wasting one’s life for.”

Although he had longstanding love affairs after Rachel, Sullivan never married.

In Sullivan’s family, the long relationship with Rachel Scott Russell was known as his one serious love affair. The blame for the failure of the relationship was laid firmly at the door of Mrs. Scott Russell because Rachel’s mother had thought that the young composer was not good enough for her daughter to take in marriage.

Such a sad chapter in the life of a man who wrote beautiful music, don’t you think?