W S Gilbert
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The Sentry’s Song: Politics are Crazy!
In Gilbert & Sullivan’s 1882 hit Iolanthe, a troupe of flighty, gauzy fairies go toe-to-toe with Britain’s venerable House of Lords. Guess who wins? (Spoiler alert: They both do.) Act II of this charming opera begins with a quiet interlude as Private Willis stands on sentry duty. He is dressed as a soldier (although it seems that is an inaccuracy, for the Houses of Parliament are actually guarded by police officers and not the army). We meet him as he’s standing at the door in Palace Yard, at the eastern (or Whitehall) end of Sir Charles Barry’s great neo-Gothic Houses of Parliament – which was only completed five years before Iolanthe was written.…
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Gilbert and Sullivan – Together
In the 1870s, Arthur Sullivan was a rising young composer whose reputation was growing steadily. At the same time, William S. Gilbert was a rising young dramatist whose plays were attracting an increasingly wider audience. They lived in the same city, they had friends in common, and each probably knew of the other’s work—we know Gilbert had heard Sullivan’s music, because he had reviewed Sullivan and Burnand’s operetta, Cox and Box, as the theater critic for Fun magazine. They had even collaborated on a Christmas entertainment, Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old. It was a successful venture in its limited way, but both men evidently considered the project a one-off.…
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Uncle Tom’s Cabin – The Power of the Pen
“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Supposedly, this is what Abraham Lincoln said when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862. In any event, her book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had a deep and lasting impact on the public not only in America but around the world, according to the Harriet Beecher Stowe center. From that source I learned: Uncle Tom’s Cabin originally appeared in installments published in an anti-slavery newspaper, The National Era, in 1851. The next year it was published as a two-volume book. It sold 300,000 copies in its first year, and became the second best-selling book of the 19th century…
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Entertaining house guests, Victorian-style
Before the Internet—even before television and radio—beamed professional entertainment directly into our homes, what did people do for fun? Our Victorian ancestors, especially those of the middle and upper classes, had plenty of leisure time to fill. One way to enjoy oneself was to invite friends over to stay for a while—three days was the standard visit. But once you had your circle of intimates gathered at your country home, what were you to do with them? Welcoming your guests The proper time for arrival was mid-afternoon, around teatime. Guests often arrived by train, so a good host would arrange for the guests to be met at the train station.…
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W.S. Gilbert’s Childhood Family Drama
Children abducted, children hidden, children mixed up by their caretakers—in William S. Gilbert’s librettos, childhood was a dangerous time. In H. M. S. Pinafore, two babies were mixed up by a careless “baby farmer” (day care provider). In The Pirates of Penzance, the young hero’s silly nursemaid apprenticed the boy to a pirate instead of a pilot, dooming him to a life of crime. In Iolanthe, the Lord Chancellor doesn’t know that he even has a son, much less that his child is the half-mortal, half-fairy Strephon. In The Gondoliers, the infant heir to the throne of Barataria was stolen by the Grand Inquisitor and raised in Venice as a…
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W.S. Gilbert: For the Birds (and Beasts)
W.S. Gilbert was known for his irascible disposition, quick temper and readiness to fight any person whom he thought deserved to be taken down. But he had a soft spot for animals and birds of all kinds, and his home of Grim’s Dyke was also home to a wide variety of creatures. Hesketh Pearson says in W.S. Gilbert, His Life and Strife: “His estate became a sort of zoological gardens… In his idyllic oasis of lawns, flowers, trees, bracken, rhododendrons, fruit gardens, ferns and beehives, he had made a lake of one-and-a-half acres, and the whole place was a sanctuary for birds and animals, many of which were quite at…
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Christmas with the Gilberts
Though William and Kitty Gilbert never had any children of their own, they both enjoyed the company of young people and loved to give lavish parties for the children of friends and family. One young lady who enjoyed their parties was Kate Terry Gielgud – the daughter of actress Kate Terry and Arthur James Lewis (a silk merchant of the firm of Lewis & Allenby), and the mother of famed actor Sir John Gielgud. In Kate Terry Gielgud: An Autobiography (1953), she explained, “Both author and composer were friends of my parents, and Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert invited us every year to Christmas parties in their house…” Born in 1868,…
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W.S. Gilbert vs. Shakespeare’s Hamlet
“If you promise me faithfully not to mention this to a single person, not even to your dearest friend,” W.S. Gilbert confessed to his actor friend George Grossmith, “I don’t think Shakespeare rollicking.” Wait, what? Shakespeare, not a laugh-a-minute dramatist? What about all those zany jesters like Touchstone and Feste? Dogsberry, not funny? Just because Victorians, who were centuries away from to the Tudors, found some of Shakespeare’s in-jokes incomprehensible doesn’t mean that audiences shouldn’t laugh at the right places, if they pretend to be cultured individuals. However, Gilbert being Gilbert, what do you think he did? He wrote a parody of Hamlet, of course! Gilbert’s play was called Rosencrantz and…
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W.S. Gilbert’s Political Snarkiness
W.S. Gilbert lampooned Victorian politics in Iolanthe, a topsy-turvy tale in which a troupe of fairies take over Parliament after their Fairy Queen is insulted by the Lord Chancellor. He mistook her for the Headmistress of a Ladies’ Seminary, and in revenge the fairies use their powers to pass all the laws the House of Peers can’t stand to see on the books. All the political “hot potato” issues of the day are blithely passed into law — from Marriage to Deceased Wife’s Sister to making a Dukedom attainable by Competitive Examination, the fairies ruthlessly suppress all objections from the peers. How can the legislators rescue themselves and the nation…
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W.S. Gilbert – The Dragon at the Stage Door
Many Victorians assumed that actresses were “no better than they should be” (i.e. very bad indeed). According to Hesketh Pearson, in Gilbert and Sullivan, “In those days actresses were considered to be saleable property. Their social status was extremely low, and the average middle-class Englishman scarcely differentiated the back of a stage from a brothel.” However, that certainly wasn’t the case for the actresses in the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. William S. Gilbert insisted on all his players behaving with utmost propriety. Jessie Bond, the long-time Savoyard actress who created many of Gilbert and Sullivan’s most delightful contralto roles, from Hebe in HMS Pinafore to Pitti-Sing in The Mikado to…
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W.S. Gilbert — a Stage-struck Kid
W.S. Gilbert was a stage-struck kid. As a youngster, he used to write plays that the family performed at home, and his mother and his two younger sisters were interested in amateur dramatics. (Gilbert and Sullivan: A Dual Biography, by Michael Ainger) When he attended the well-regarded public school, the Great Ealing School in London, he would write plays, direct them, and even paint the scenery. One of the plays he produced was called Guy Fawkes, in which he also played the principal role. In February 1852, the 15-year-old Gilbert went to see The Corsican Brothers by Dion Boucicault, at the Princess’ Theater in Oxford Street. He was so impressed…
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W.S. Gilbert – Tilting at Social Windmills
Nothing succeeds like success! Although W. S. Gilbert is known mainly for his brilliant comic operas with Arthur Sullivan, he wrote many other plays, some of which addressed serious social issues and which turned out to be the inspiration for later works by other playwrights. Here are a few examples: Charity (1874) is a play about Mrs. Van Brugh, a good woman who, in her youth, lived with a man without benefit of marriage, and they had an illegitimate child. Now a widow of 35 years’ standing, she has dedicated her life to helping those in need. She has almshouses, and scandalizes the village by letting in not only good Anglicans,…
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W.S. Gilbert – Kidnapped!
Sometimes real life imitates art. Or it inspires art. William S. Gilbert’s plots involving stolen babies were inspired by his own life: As a baby, he was kidnapped by bandits. When Gilbert was not yet 2 years old (as the story goes), and a few months before his sister Jane was born in October 1838, his parents were traveling around the Continent and they stopped in Naples, Italy. In Naples, his parents had hired a maid to look after their young son. As the maid and baby were out on a walk, a couple of men approached her and said that the “English gentleman” wanted his child returned to him right…
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Sullivan and Dickens
One man was a mere 20-year-old, a musician and composer of modest origins. The other, at 60, was one of the most celebrated writers of his time. Yet it’s not surprising that young Arthur Sullivan could count Charles Dickens as a friend. Sullivan has been called a “born courtier,” so charming and delightful to be with that he could make friends with anyone. And his friendships with influential people over the years boosted his career amazingly – from his violin-playing friend Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, to the composer Rossini, to famous soprano Jenny Lind (the Swedish Nightingale). Even Queen Victoria admired him; she conferred a knighthood upon him in 1883…
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Which Came First, the Music or the Words?
When writing a song, what does a composer start with – the tune, or the lyrics? Do you come up with words to fit a particular melody, or do you read the words and imagine a tune that would fit the words? The answer is, different composers and lyricists work in different ways. For Gilbert and Sullivan, the journey from musical idea to finished song took an interesting path: Gilbert would write lyrics that fit a popular tune he had in mind. Then he would give the words to Sullivan, without telling him what song he’d used. Sullivan would study the rhythm of the words and come up with a tune that…
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W.S. Gilbert’s Family History…Look, a Squirrel!
What was Sir William Gilbert’s family background? Was he a descendant of a distinguished and noble family line that included the Elizabethan navigator, Sir Humphrey Gilbert? Or was he the descendant of a Hampshire yeoman who moved to London and found prosperity through his corner grocery store? During his life, W. S. Gilbert’s family legend was that the original Gilberts came from Cornwall. The most notable member of the family was Sir Humphrey Gilbert (1539-1583) who was Sir Walter Raleigh’s half-brother (they had the same mother, Catherine Champernowne). Sir Humphrey was an adventurer, explorer, member of parliament, a soldier serving under the reign of Queen Elizabeth and a pioneer of…
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W.S. Gilbert on “The Reward of Merit”
It is said that William S. Gilbert was often annoyed that the Victorian public seemed to worship men with money or aristocratic birth, and totally ignored men of talent and genius. So the notion that one had to be rich or titled to get respect was probably on his mind when he composed the following poem, “The Reward of Merit.” Originally, these were the words to a song that was to have been sung in the second act of “Iolanthe,” but it was cut on the grounds that it slowed down the story. So instead, Gilbert included it in the 1897 edition of Bab Ballads. Some of the references in…
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W.S. Gilbert, Amateur Photographer
In his later years, William S. Gilbert’s favorite hobbies were croquet and photography. Of course, Gilbert wasn’t the only “shutter-bug” out there. During the 1880s, when he seems to have taken up the hobby, photography had become a popular pastime. Check out this PBS documentary on the subject. The Kodak camera was introduced in May 1888. It was easy to use – Eastman’s advertising slogan was “You press the button, we do the rest.” On the down side, it cost a then-whopping $25 (still less than a wet-plate camera). Everyone tried out the Kodak camera – President Grover Cleveland had one. Even the Dalai Lama had one, and brought his…
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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…
- Victorian feminism, Victorian love and marriage, Victorian theater, Victorian women, Victoriana, W S Gilbert
Was W. S. Gilbert a Victorian Feminist?
What did W.S. Gilbert think about women? During the Victorian era, the division between the worlds of men and women seemed particularly wide, with many popular male writers making efforts to restrict women to the domestic sphere of influence. But as society at large changed, the role of women in public life was expanded – women began to be admitted to colleges and universities, reformers such as John Stuart Mill advocated for women’s right to vote, and women were increasingly able to participate in the world outside their homes. So what was William S. Gilbert’s attitude toward women in the public arena? “Gilbert always enjoyed the company of women, particularly…
