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.

In the beginning

Maybe I shouldn't say too much about this at the moment, but let's just say it looks like the BBC will be doing its bit to mark the Gilbert centenary.... More later, possibly.

I have a strange between-projects feeling at the moment, though I should be pressing on with the articles to publicise the book. I am also trying to write a play (actually two plays, a biggie and a little one-acter for a local showcase called Page to Stage) and there are other distractions as well. I stayed in yesterday, intending to write, but ended up wasting practically every minute. So today I went out and I've already achieved more. For one thing, I'm writing this blog!

I've nothing to say today, so maybe I could spend ten minutes describing the origins of the Gilbert biography. I've been obsessed with the man since I was about fifteen, and for about ten years my G&S friends have been saying I should write his biography. Abut three years ago I started tinkering with the idea. I wrote a ridiculous draft of a first chapter in which I thought I could get away with skimming over his childhood and starting with the "interesting" bit, his first plays (written at the age of 30). Because the fact is that I always find the early "childhood" chapters by far the most boring part of any biography, and naively I thought they might be unnecessary in Gilbert's case because so little is known about his early years. However, as I tried to proceed on that assumption it rapidly became more and more obvious that this could not possibly work. How can you construct the building without laying the foundation? Without Gilbert's childhood, he is incomprehensible. He is a miraculous goblin without motivation or background.

But still the problem remained. If you look at the previous biographies you see that very little has been written about his childhood, and the overwhelming impression is that there is no evidence to fill in the details. But as I dug more I realised this was not really the case. David Eden's deliberately provocative book W.S. Gilbert: Appearance and Reality contains a wealth of new information (and speculation) about Gilbert's family background, though assembled in no very coherent order. For my own satisfaction (I still didn't have a book contract at this point) I tried to reassemble Eden's information in a logical order, weeding out parts that I did not feel were supported by the facts (such as his contention that Gilbert's father was an alcoholic who had admitted himself into a lunatic asylum for his own good--an interesting idea, but one with no concrete support at all except father Gilbert's own descriptions of delirium tremens and lunatic asylums, written as part of novels and researched articles).

I also found other sources of information in Gilbert's own articles. His humorous articles for Fun include a good number of evidently autobiographical fragments which, amazingly, have not been used bhy previous writers. They describe his school days, his early affections, his time working at the Education Office. Other articles illuminate such matters as his view of childhood in general--"the most miserable period of our existence" he called it, as I recall without going to the faff of checking the quotation--and his early adoration of the pantomime Harlequinade.

I tinkered with this first chapter for about a year. Then, through a process which I will not describe in detail bt which boils down to knowing someone who knew a publisher, I got my contract, and I set to work with a will. I had already amassed enough new material (from the Fun columns) to convince me that it was worth doing. I took a research trip to London, and I made an entirely new Discovery which made me realise that previous biographers really had not covered the territory as I had thought, and that there really were new things to find out about Gilbert. That's a story for later, I think. But I will say this, not going into detail. At every stage of the writing I kept finding out new things which revived my interest in the project just as it flagged. Maybe it was finding his war dispatches for The Observer, maybe it was discovering a new article by him describing his "last client", and maybe it was reading the reviews of his plays which laid bare how much some of the critics loathed him. But it all added up to create (I hope) something like one of my early ideas of what the biography should be: a kaleidoscopic view of the man from all kinds of angles, contradictory and incoherent and multi-faceted. That book would have been called Aspects of Gilbert, in case you're interested.

Another idea I had was to write a seriously eccentric biography arranged like an encyclopedia under different headings. That would have been called The Gilbert Encyclopedia: An A-Y of Gilbert. Everyone I told about that objected that with a bit of finessing I could easily find an entry or two for Z (characters in some of his plays, like Zeolide and Zayda). I don't think they realised I wanted it to be an A-Y: it would be funnier. However. The eccentric ideas fell by the wayside, and what I've ended up with is something like a conventional biography, though with the slight oddity of not attempting to be utterly comprehensive as most biographies try to be these days.

That's enough for one day.