Dialectics of Social Class in the Gilbert and Sullivan Collaboration

The particular hybrid quality of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas had much to do with the social origins of the authors. The librettist W. S. Gilbert grew up with solidly middle-class values, while the composer Arthur Sullivan, born in the working-class district of Lambeth, relished nothing more than the entrée his musical triumphs allowed him to the world of the aristocracy. But Gilbert’s librettos bridged this divide, as the most successful among them depicted lower class characters catapulted to exalted social rank, but owing their elevation to the agency of law—which, in its official and unofficial guises, was the arbiter and guide of Victorian bourgeois conduct.