Education, education, education

Yes, I think it's safe. I can afford to reveal some of the new material in the biography now that it's safely launched into the world. It's fair to say that the majority of the revelations relate to his early, pre-Gilbert-and-Sullivan, life. And, as I'm sure I've said more than once on this blog, and perhaps in every single entry since the beginning, that is what makes it important. I have been able to reveal some of the factors which made Gilbert Gilbert.

When Gilbert left King's College, London, in 1856, he had messed up his education to a remarkable extent. He did not, as intended, go on to Oxford. He did not even take his B.A. exam at the proper time, but waited until the following year. All this seems to have happened because he was distracted by the idea of getting an army commission and fighting in the Crimean War. Luckily, he didn't manage to do that either.

But all these failed ambitions meant that he was left in the big wide world without a career plan. It appears that his father, who had an "independent income", nevertheless refused to suppor his son until he found a career; at any rate, the evidence suggests he left the parental home about this time. And on 24 February 1857 he was appointed as an Assistant Clerk, (Third Class) at the Committee of Council on Education, otherwise called the Education Office. He remained there for almost six years, until he resigned on 14 November 1862, which he called "the happiest day of my life."

He hated working there, and he took every opportunity to revenge himself on his employers. At the end of 1861 he started contributing to a satirical weekly paper called Fun. One of his earliest cartoons, signed "Bab", was an attack on the Education Office, and it was published in the issue for 9 November 1861, while Gilbert was still being employed by them:

On the opposite page, a linked article described the department's new Education Code as "anything but a Code of Honour, for it systematically breaks faith with every certificated schoolmaster in the government employ." This article is, in my opinion, most probably by Gilbert.

He continued to attack the Office in the paper both before and after his resignation. On 23 April 1864, a topical poem called "Mr. Morell and the Privy Council Office" made fun of several Education Office officials, including a certain Ralph Robert Wheeler Lingen, who had been Gilbert's boss at the department all the time he was there, and whom he portrayed in the poem's "initial" with ass's ears (see above). The drawing is signed "W.S.G." and the poem itself is probably by him as well.

The political head of the department was Robert Lowe. Coincidentally (or not) Lowe was one of the politicians cruelly caricatured in the Gilbert/a Beckett satire The Happy Land of 1873.

One more revelation from the book. In April 1858 he was reprimanded at the Office for "disrespectful and insubordinate conduct." We may not be surprised.