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Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan

His Life and Character

The History Press

THE GILBERT FAMILY (1836–53)

'Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, and Clown!' There is an agreeable magic in these words, although they carry us back to the most miserable period of our existence – early childhood. They stand out in our recollection vividly and distinctly, for they are associated with one of the very few real enjoyments permitted to us at that grim stage of our development.

'Getting Up a Pantomime', in London Society (January 1868)

William Gilbert, W.S. Gilbert's father, was the son of a successful grocer. He was born on 20 May 1804; he was an orphan before his eighth birthday, both his parents having died of consumption. He and his younger brother and sister (Joseph Mathers Gilbert and Jane Gilbert) then passed into the caring hands of their uncle and aunt, John Samuel Schwenck and Mary Schwenck.

William Gilbert's father, William Gilbert the grocer, had died a very wealthy man. He left enough money to make all three children financially independent (meaning that they did not need to work for a living). His will made the Schwencks trustees of a sum of money which was to be invested in stocks until the children came of age. Additionally, Mary Schwenck's father, Joseph Mathers, a wealthy soap-boiler, left a will ensuring that his money would go to the three Gilbert children after the deaths of his wife and daughter. Thus William Gilbert lived from a very early age with the promise of being able to live on the proceeds of invested capital.

Many details of his early life lie shrouded in mystery. However, it does appear that he spent some of his adolescent years in Italy (Milan or Ponte di Lombro), possibly in order to recover from an illness. When he came of age and received his inheritance, in 1825, he was certainly back in London – lending money at extortionate rates, probably on the advice of his guardian John Samuel Schwenck.

At about this time William Gilbert started to study to become a surgeon. It is not clear why he chose to study for this brutal, messy and exacting profession; perhaps his guardians insisted on his having some useful skill to fall back upon in case of financial difficulty. He passed the examination of the Royal College of Surgeons in December 1830, but it seems he 'retired' after a couple of years at most, and it is unclear whether he ever had a professional practice at all. However, from 1828 onwards he was a Life Governor at the Westminster Hospital, and he regularly attended the hospital's committees right up to 1889, within a few months of his death.

On 5 September 1832, he married Mary Ann Skelton at St James' church, Piccadilly. He was 28 years old; she was 19. We may safely assume that he did not marry her for her money: her father John Henry Skelton had been declared bankrupt the previous year. William Gilbert had distinct romantic tendencies in his youth – around this time he even committed the obligatory folly of his age in having a volume of his bad poetry printed privately – so it is even possible that he married her because he was in love with her.

She appears to have been consumptive. He seems to have tried to cure her illness in the clean air of Italy. She died in Milan on 15 October 1834. There were no children by this marriage.

On 12 February 1836 he married for a second time; his bride was Anne Mary Bye Morris. He was 31; she was 24. Her father was Thomas Morris, an elderly doctor whom William Gilbert had followed during his medical studies. Anne Mary Bye Morris will shortly become the mother of our hero, so it will be appropriate here to give some details about her life and personality. Appropriate, but not possible. There is little surviving evidence of her life – there are no photographs or portraits, and only a small handful of letters – so it would be easy to dismiss her as a cipher, were it not for the fact that her later actions suggest her to be anything but. Forty years later, in 1876, she separated from her dominating and bad-tempered husband in a storm of acrimony. Though we know very little about her, we can say one thing at least: she did not always fit the Victorian ideal of the obedient and submissive wife.

She was related, on her mother's side, to the Scottish Sutherland lords of Duffus and the earls of Sutherland. She was therefore somewhat higher born than William Gilbert the grocer's son, though not to an extent that would make their marriage a misalliance. If she was tangentially related to the Scottish aristocracy, he was lower born but wealthy enough to live without working, which was one of the great pre-twentieth-century criteria of 'respectability'. There is, again, no reason to suppose the alliance was based on anything except affection – no matter how the couple felt about each other forty long years later.

William Gilbert had not got round to finding a house suitable for a married couple during the two years of his first marriage. After this second wedding, he and his new wife resided temporarily at 17 Southampton Street, just off the Strand in central London, where Dr and Mrs Morris lived. It was in this house that W.S. Gilbert was born, on 18 November 1836, just nine months after his parents' marriage. On 11 January 1837 the baby was christened at the church of St Paul, Covent Garden. He was named William, like his father and his father's father before him, and Schwenck, in honour of his father's old guardians who now became his godparents. There is no evidence for the persistent rumour that Gilbert disliked his middle name. On the contrary, he was known within the family as Schwenck or Uncle Schwenck throughout his life, and when he began making his living as a writer and illustrator he gave his name as W. Schwenck Gilbert.

He was born at the very beginning of a great time of change. The year 1836 saw the publication of Charles Dickens' first book, Sketches by Boz, and the serialisation of the first instalments of The Pickwick Papers. King William IV was still alive but ill; the reign of Queen Victoria would begin in June the following year. English life was in the process of transformation from broadly rural and agricultural to mostly urban and industrial; London was on the brink of an uncontrolled expansion. Just over two years before, in October 1834, the old Houses of Parliament at Westminster had burned to the ground as the result of a semi-farcical accident; the new buildings which we know today were completed in 1870. In 1837 Euston Station, the first railway terminus, was built in London – the great railway boom of the 1840s would follow close at its heels. And all this change, expansion and transformation would take place during the years when W.S. Gilbert was growing up.

In the summer of 1838, when Gilbert was approaching his second birthday, the Gilberts were travelling on the Continent. William Gilbert had brought his first wife to Naples, and now he was bringing his second wife and their son to the same spot. The fact is intriguing, and suggests that the town had some deep private significance in his mind. On 5 October 1838, Anne Gilbert gave birth to her second child there. It was a girl, and the parents named her Jane Morris Gilbert.

Gilbert told his first biographer Edith Browne that he had been briefly kidnapped by brigands during this early visit to Naples: 'Gilbert distinctly remembers riding in front of a man on an animal through what seemed to be a cutting with steep banks on either side; in later days, when he was again in Naples, he recognised in the Via Posilippo the scene which had impressed itself on his infant memory.' According to this account, he was ransomed for £25 and restored to his parents. Recent researchers have scoured the records for evidence of such a kidnapping and found nothing: it seems that the event simply did not take place, at least in the manner described. However, we should not dismiss the basic memory out of hand, especially bearing in mind that he told Browne he remembered it 'distinctly'. We may doubt that he was kidnapped (while noting his fondness for romantic events – and for being the centre of attention), but that sharp image of the horse, the rider and the steep banks, held in his head for nearly seventy years, is another matter.

The Gilberts returned to England in 1839 and finally took a house of their own: 4 Portland Place, Hammersmith (this street is now called Addison Bridge Place). Here they lived with two servants. There seems to have been a high rate of turnover of servants in the Gilbert household at this time, for in June 1841, when the census was taken, their names were Sarah Dobson and Ann Tucker, but when in November of the same year William Gilbert asked his servants to witness the codicil to the will of Joseph Mathers Gilbert, they were Mary Simpson and Dinah Searle.

Almost nothing is known of these women, but, as they would have been among baby Gilbert's formative influences, let us give them a moment's attention. In the 1841 census, Sarah Dobson was described as being 30 years old and Ann Tucker 18, though it is important to note that all adult ages were rounded down to the nearest five years in this particular census. In Gilbert's 1876 short story Little Mim, the narrator looks back on his childhood and remembers being looked after by two servants: Nurse Starke, 'a tall, muscular, hardened woman of forty' who curled the children's hair into tight, painful coils, and a housemaid, the gentler Jane Cotter. The story is, of course, fiction, but we may imagine Gilbert at least drawing upon his own childhood to create that little fictional world. When, in the last years of his life, he wrote a children's retelling of The Mikado, he included among those who 'never would be missed' another Nurse Starke: 'the nursemaid who each evening in curlpapers does your hair/With an aggravating twist.'

According to Gilbert's own account made in 1867, at the age of 2 he:

was clandestinely married ... in a back garden somewhere in Hammersmith, to a very worthy young person in a quilted satin bonnet and knitted socks, which used to drop off in an inconvenient manner whenever she sneezed, or otherwise exerted herself. The marriage was afterwards set aside on the ground that the officiating priest, her nurse, was not a qualified functionary.

As so often with Gilbert, the joke may also be something like the truth.

The Gilberts were now living conveniently close to some relatives on the mother's side, the Edwardses, and also to some more remote relatives, the à Becketts, with whom the Gilberts were friendly throughout this period.

Gilbert Abbott à Beckett (1811–56) was a prolific journalist, humorist and playwright, who had by this time founded and edited several short-lived journals, including The Censor (1828–29) and Figaro in London (1831–39). He had married in 1835, and his eldest son Gilbert Arthur à Beckett had been born on 7 April 1837. There is every reason to think that William Schwenck Gilbert and Gilbert Arthur à Beckett were close childhood friends.

The career of the elder Gilbert à Beckett was given an extra boost in 1841 by the creation of a new satirical journal: Punch. During its early years he was to be one of its most prolific contributors.

The year 1841 also saw the first scenes of a painful and grotesque drama in the Gilbert family. The will of wealthy old William Gilbert the grocer had divided enough money and property between his three children to make them financially independent. Two of the three siblings were now on the verge of death.

Jane Gilbert died first, at Merton Lodge, Weybridge Common, on 5 October 1841. Her estate went to John Samuel Schwenck and to her brothers Joseph and William. Joseph died of consumption not long after, on 20 November, while staying with William. His main will directed that a fund should be created, the interest of which was to maintain his wife and two children. His wife was to be the children's guardian. A codicil made on 2 November, while staying with William, appointed William Gilbert as the children's second guardian.

In April 1842 William Gilbert persuaded Catherine Gilbert to sign a deed agreeing that, in the event of the death of Catherine's children, all their inherited wealth should go to William Gilbert. As the children were consumptive, their early death was a distinct possibility. William Gilbert argued that his brother Joseph would have wanted the money to stay in the Gilbert family rather than going to Catherine, as would happen if the children died intestate. The deed was signed on 27 April 1842.

They agreed that William Gilbert should sign a similar deed relating to his own children, but he later refused to do so, much to Catherine's disquiet.

This, then, was the situation: William Gilbert was guardian to two children, and their deaths would make him rich. To make the situation even more disturbing, there is every reason to believe that William Gilbert was running short of money – not surprising, given his taste for visits to Milan and his rapidly growing family. Little wonder that Catherine Gilbert wrote a couple of years later, when she realised the full situation: 'I ... cannot feel much confidence in leaving my little children to his guardianship.'

At this time William Gilbert started to make some first tentative steps towards professional writing. His English translation of the Donizetti opera Lucia di Lammermoor was performed at the Princess's Theatre on 19 January 1843, though it earned devastating reviews which referred to his work as 'doggerel', a 'concoction of stupid trash' and so on. Despite this, he continued to try writing for the stage, though even his son was caustic about these plays, telling us through Edith Browne that they tended to be 'of a model in which the heroine makes her début in the first act and does not appear again till the last scene, the interest in her being theoretically maintained during her lengthy absence by sundry references in the dialogue'.

Young Gilbert was now 6 years old, with one younger sister and another on its way. And something was about to happen which would set the course of the rest of his life. He was about to fall in love – with the theatre.

The Christmas pantomime was a rather different animal in those days from what it is today. For one thing, it took place late at night. It was the last item in the long evening's entertainment, after a substantial drama and possibly a little curtain-raiser as well. It started at ten o'clock or possibly a little before. It consisted of an 'opening' – a little drama in rhyming couplets on some children's theme, but at this time not usually a fairy tale – followed by the harlequinade, which was what everyone was really waiting for. These late-night fantasies must have been, to a small child who would normally have been sound asleep at this hour, truly the stuff that dreams are made on. They burrowed deep and lifelong into the psyches of many Victorians, including that of W.S. Gilbert.

Despite its name, the harlequinade was not really about Harlequin. The central character, the beginning and end of its anarchic fun, was Clown. The first great clown, Joseph Grimaldi, stole the pranks and tricks of the old Harlequin and made them his own. Most of the jokes, catchphrases and songs of the Victorian clown were created by Grimaldi. It became a commonplace to say, after his retirement from the stage in 1828, that no other clown could hold a candle to him. But the harlequinade, with Clown as its presiding genius, somehow survived through the decades and only started to wither away round about the year 1880, when the music-hall artistes began to take over.

So the pantomime 'opening' would draw to a close, with a Fairy Queen arbitrarily transforming its characters into Harlequin, Columbine, Clown and Pantaloon, and an elaborate 'transformation scene' would take place with lots of sparkle and glitter, and the harlequinade would be inaugurated with Clown's exuberant cry: 'Here we are again!' Clown would play elaborate, cartoonish practical jokes on policemen, tradesmen and passers-by, with the assistance of his elderly accomplice Pantaloon. Harlequin and his sweetheart Columbine would dance through the scenes together, Harlequin sometimes varying the monotony by taking a 'Harlequin leap' through a window or door, or transforming household objects with his magic bat. But always it would be Clown – making butter-slides, tripping people up, crushing babies, flattening people by putting them through the mangle, stealing sausages, cheating Pantaloon and generally creating havoc – who stole the show.

Looking back on those early years, Gilbert exclaimed:

'Harlequin, Columbine, Clown, and Pantaloon!' Yes, they awaken, in my mind at all events, the only recollection of unmixed pleasure associated with early childhood. Those night expeditions to a mystic building, where incomprehensible beings of all descriptions held astounding revels, under circumstances which I never endeavoured to account for, were, to my infant mind, absolute realizations of a fairy mythology which I had almost incorporated with my religious faith ... To be a Harlequin or Columbine was the summit of earthly happiness to which a worthy man or woman could aspire; while the condition of Clown or Pantaloon was a fitting purgatory in which to expiate the guilty deeds of a life misspent.

We do not know what Gilbert's first pantomime was. But the London-born humorist Francis Cowley Burnand tells us in his Records and Reminiscences (1904) that the first pantomime he ever saw was Harlequin and William Tell; or, The Genius of the Ribstone Pippin at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 26 December 1842. Burnand was just eleven days younger than Gilbert, so we will not go too far wrong if we imagine young Gilbert being taken to his first pantomime in the same year – perhaps, with a slight stretch of probabilities, even sharing the same auditorium with young Burnand.

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Excerpted from Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan by Andrew Crowther. Copyright © 2011 Crowther,. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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