W.S Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan

"If you want to know who we are..."

--The Mikado

William Schwenck Gilbert

On November 18, 1836 at #17, Southampton Street, Strand, England, a boy was born to William and Anne Gilbert. They named him William Schwenck Gilbert. W.S. Gilbert's father was a surgeon for the navy. His mother was Scottish, and the daughter of Dr. Thomas Morris.

Little is known about Gilbert's childhood, except that when he was two, during a trip through Southern Europe, a couple of Italian brigands kidnapped him. His father was forced to pay £ 25 (about $125.00) to the kidnappers for the return of his son. Even at this age Gilbert was inspired. Situations in which babies being kidnapped and switched around are found often in his stories.

At the age of thirteen, Gilbert was sent to the Great Ealing School. He became very good at translating Greek and Latin. He liked writing. Gilbert's first attempt at light verse was written in his exercise book, in Paris when he was recovering from a bout of typhoid fever. He had just watched Napoleon III ride by, and wrote a verse, in which he imagined what Napoleon had thought about him:

And I never saw a phiz
As wonderful as 'is.

In case you didn’t know, “phiz” is an old slang world for face.

By the time Gilbert was 16 he was head boy. After he finished at Ealing, Gilbert went to King’s College. His ambition was to become a lawyer. Throughout college he contributed satirical articles to the campus newspaper. He wrote articles and drew caricatures of his friends. Needless to say, he didn’t have many.

After graduating from King’s college, Gilbert worked as an apprentice in a clerk’s office, earning £ 120 ($600.00) a year. He was selling verses on the side. He made very little money, so he joined the army. He was in the 5th West Yorkshire Militia. Gilbert fell in love with uniforms. After four years in the army, Gilbert had enough money to go to into the legal profession. He continued to write verses on the side.

Gilbert was an unsuccessful lawyer. He was not an unsuccessful writer, however. He had started writing what he called Bab Ballads in 1861. He supplied them regularly for a magazine called Fun. Bab had been his childhood nickname. These ballads were usually about a page long, accompanied with Gilbert’s own eccentric drawings. The topics and names in these ballads were often used in his later collaborations.

In 1866, one of his best friends, Tom Robertson, who was a playwright, encouraged Gilbert to write a burlesque. Gilbert allowed himself to be persuaded, and wrote a parody of Donizetti’s opera L’Elisir D’Amore (The Love Potion), for the Christmas burlesque at St. James Theatre. He called it Dulcamara or The Little Duck and the Great Quack. Gilbert wrote Dulcamara in ten days. It was rehearsed for a week, and was met with great success.

In 1867, Gilbert married Miss Lucy Agnes Turner. He was 31. She was seventeen, with blond hair, delicate features and blue eyes. She was the prototype for all the women Gilbert later had crushes on.

Meanwhile, commissions were pouring in for plays. Gilbert started perfecting his art. Most of his plays from this time period are not very good, and they aren’t performed very often.

In 1869, Gilbert was rehearsing an operetta he had written, that Frederic Clay had written the music to. Clay had asked his good friend Sullivan to stop by. That is where Gilbert and Sullivan met for the first time. Sullivan was 27, and Gilbert was 33.

Over a 25 year period, Gilbert produced 14 operettas in collaboration with Sullivan. Their relationship began to go downhill after The Yeoman of the Guard was produced in 1888, and came to a close after The Grand Duke was produced in 1896, mostly as a result of Gilbert's highly explosive temper. Gilbert died in 1911, while trying to save a young lady who couldn't swim. His heart failed him in the water.