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Notes
Townley Searle, Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1931), and Reginald Allen, W. S. Gilbert: An Anniversary Survey and Exhibition Checklist (1963).
This contract is preserved in the archives of the publishers Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., in their offices at 68-74 Carter Lane, London. The sense in which "publication" and "publish" are used here is the precise bibliographical definition referring to the date on which a book is first offered for public sale. This standard definition is given its fullest presentation in Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949) pp. 374-376. The evidence of additional contracts, letters, advertisements, and publication notices shows that The "Bab" Ballads published by John Camden Hotten and dated 1869 on the title-page was in the bookshops by 19 December 1868, and Fifty "Bab" Ballads (Routledge) with its printed date of 1877 was on sale officially by 16 December 1876. Accepting the precise bibliographical definition of publication forces the dating of The "Bab" Ballads as 1868 and Fifty "Bab" Ballads as 1876, despite their imprints. Only expedience and a wish for consistency with the title-page dates can justify continued reference to publication in 1869 and 1877 respectively. The British Museum catalogue notation "The 'Bab' Ballads, . . . . , 1869 [1868]" seems most desirable because most fully descriptive of the bibliographical facts.
On 111, the final issue of the so-called "old series" of Fun edited by H. J. Byron is also misdated. The date is given as 20 May 1865, whereas the last number produced under Byron's editorship was that for the previous week dated 13 May. The 20 May issue inaugurated the New Series with a large notice to that effect. Unfortunately the Proprietor's Copy of Fun is wanting that first number of the New Series, ruling out the possibility of positively identifying in it any contributions by Gilbert.
Ellis, 111. In Mr. Ellis' edition of Gilbert's poems, The Bab Ballads by W. S. Gilbert (1970), as in the article, the comic by-line is not printed along with the text of the poem, but only recorded in a note (p. 313). (Future reference to this book will be made as "Ellis Edition" to distinguish it from the essay.)
For a full discussion of the poem as parody, with quotations from Tennyson, see John Bush Jones, "The Uncollected Verse of W. S. Gilbert: A Critical Edition," Diss. Northwestern University 1970, pp. 220-222; hereafter cited as "Jones Diss."
The poems in chronological order are "Ne T'en Va Pas," "Something Like Nonsense Verses," "Ode to My Clothes," "In Re Dawkins," "Garryowen," "Something Like Nonsense Verses No. II," "The Student," "Tempora Mutantur," "The Bachelors' Strike," "Good-Bye, Sweet-Heart, Good-Bye," "A Bad Night of It," "A Good Joke: To (Say) Phoebe," "Ozone," "To the Terrestrial Globe," "The Monkey in Trouble," "Back Again!" "An Impromptu: To Mademoiselle Lucca," "Musings in a Music Hall," "Pantomimic Presentiments," "The Bar and Its Moaning," "'I Do Adore Thee!'" "To Euphrosyne," "The Phantom Curate," "To a Little Maid," "Ferdinando and Elvira," "The Pantomime 'Super' to His Mask," "The Yarn of the Nancy Bell [sic]," "Monsieur le Blond on London," "Haunted," and "The Reverend Rawston Wright." The dates and pages of Fun containing these verses will be found in John Bush Jones, "W. S. Gilbert's Contributions to Fun, 1865-1874," Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 73 (1969), 257-259; hereafter to be cited as "Jones."
Ellis Edition, p. 13, n. 24. "Something Like Nonsense Verses" and "Something Like Nonsense Verses No. II" are combined as a single poem under the former title; the verses excluded from the edition are "Ne T'en Va Pas," "In Re Dawkins," "Garryowen," "Good-Bye, Sweet-Heart, Good-Bye," "An Impromptu: To Mademoiselle Lucca," and "'I Do Adore Thee!'"
The poems are "To My Bride," "Only a Dancing Girl," "To My Steed," "A New Ballad: Upon the Shore," "King Borria Bungalee Boo," "Jack Casts His Shell," and "How to Write an Irish Drama." See Jones, 259-260. Of these verses, only "A New Ballad: Upon the Shore" is omitted from Mr. Ellis' edition. That in this period Gilbert contributed to Fun only seven verses and the fourteen installments of "Men We Meet" should not suggest that he was reducing his activities as a comic journalist; his total output for Fun alone during this twelvemonth was fifty-nine items.
For a full discussion and the reprinting of "The Return" see John Bush Jones, "Bab and Punch: Gilbert's Contributions Identified," forthcoming in Gilbert and Sullivan, papers from the International Conference on Gilbert and Sullivan, May 1970, to be published in the University of Kansas Libraries Series.
This is not meant to include "The Advent of Spring," the attribution of which Mr. Ellis delineates precisely and thoroughly on 111.
It may be better to say that no attribution can be made at this time because of insufficient evidence.
Ellis, 112. The two "old series" "W. S. G."-illustrated poems not mentioned in the essay are "Sixty-Three and Sixty-Four" (2 January 1864) and "The Dream" (27 February 1864). Both are included in Mr. Ellis' edition of Gilbert's verse.
Ellis, 112, n. 9. A portion of Gilbert's letter containing this denial of authorship is quoted as "the absurd verses were not written by me." Phrased in this manner, however, the extract requires an ellipsis indicated, as the full remark is "the absurd verses on Napoleon III, published in an early number of 'Fun' were not written by me." Als. dated 29 January 1885 from Gilbert to E. Bruce Hindle, quoted by permission of the Trustees of the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Royal General Theatrical Fund Association, the owner of the subsisting copyright of the unpublished letters of Sir William Gilbert. In both his essay and his edition, Mr. Ellis refers to the recipient of this letter only as a "correspondent" (Ellis, 112, n. 9, and 139; Ellis Edition, p. 7). Hindle did have some correspondence with Gilbert, but this letter is Gilbert's formal written reply to Hindle's long review article "W. S. Gilbert, Playwright and Humorist" in the January 1885 Manchester Quarterly. Gilbert's disavowal of "The Lie of a Lifetime" is not an off-hand answer to a correspondent's query of authorship, but his ultimate defense against a critic who said the poem was "turgid, uneasy, pretentious; the lines often limp sadly; and altogether the performance, though intended for poetry, could scarcely be so called, and did not contain much promise" (Hindle, 59). For further consideration and an additional interpretation of Gilbert's letter to Hindle, see Jones Diss., pp. 195-196.
Fun, 4 May 1867, p. 77; this drawing is signed "Bab" and shows Gilbert to be an occasional illustrator of other men's verse even when the illustrated Bab Ballads were beginning to appear in Fun. Searle wrongly took this drawing as evidence of Gilbert's authorship and included the poem in his Lost Bab Ballads. The Proprietor's Copy contains the needed external evidence for the correct attribution of both the drawing and the text.
On 113, "The Baron" is referred to matter-of-factly as "the longest, most abundantly illustrated of Gilbert's poems." The quoted line occurs in Ellis, 114; the Baron, replete with teeth, may be seen there and on the preceding page.
S. Schoenbaum, "Internal Evidence and the Attribution of Elizabethan Plays," Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 65 (1961), 102-124.
Reference is made here to all his work —prose, verse, dramatic parody, and illustration—in the New Series of Fun in 1865 and 1866, positively identified in the Proprietor's Copy; for the full list, see Jones, 257-260.
The Proprietor's Copy identifies Tom Hood as the author of "Jopkins's Ghost," with illustration by Alfred Thompson; the writer and artist of "King Archibald Naso" are, respectively, Clement Scott and one Wells. Because "Crinoline on the Ice" appears in the "old series," its author cannot as yet be identified.
Sidney Dark and Rowland Grey, W. S. Gilbert: His Life and Letters (1923), reprint seven verses Gilbert did not collect; Isaac Goldberg, The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1928), reprints an additional eleven. Bulloch committed his errors in "The Bab Ballads by Titles," N&Q, 172 (22 May 1937), 362-367.
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