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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
W. S. Gilbert's "The Bab Ballads" is a delightful collection of comic poems that satirize Victorian society and culture through a lens of wit and absurdity. Each ballad is characterized by Gilbert's masterful command of rhythm and rhyme, seamlessly combining humor with incisive commentary on social norms, morality, and the human condition. The collection is rich in colorful characters and whimsical situations, showcasing Gilbert's ability to engage with the zeitgeist of his time while employing a playful linguistic style that invites both laughter and reflection. Born in 1836, W. S. Gilbert was a playwright, poet, and illustrator, known predominantly for his collaboration with composer Arthur Sullivan in creating enduring operettas. His keen observations of society, shaped by his own experiences and influences from the artistic milieu of the 19th century, largely inform "The Bab Ballads." Gilbert's background in law and his passion for the theatre allowed him to develop a unique voice that wielded humor as both a weapon and a shield in critiquing the absurdities of life. Readers seeking to immerse themselves in a vibrant exploration of Victorian life while relishing clever wordplay will find "The Bab Ballads" irresistible. Gilbert's timeless humor and sharp insights ensure that this collection remains relevant, offering a rich tapestry of societal critiques wrapped in playful verse, making it essential reading for lovers of literature and comedy alike. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Bab Ballads
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author volume assembles the comic verse known as The Bab Ballads by W. S. Gilbert, first familiar to Victorian readers through the London weekly Fun, where Gilbert, signing himself as Bab, paired mischievous tales in rhyme with his own pen-and-ink cartoons. Gathered here as a coherent body of work, these ballads reveal the breadth of Gilbert’s satirical imagination before and alongside his theatre triumphs. The collection’s purpose is to present the range and continuity of his light verse—its shipboard yarns, clerical skits, romantic send-ups, and mock-heroic escapades—so that readers may encounter the distinct voice, narrative ingenuity, and metrical bravura that made these pieces enduringly popular.
Although unified by a ballad tradition, the pieces here are varied in text type. Most are comic narrative poems that tell a story in lively stanzas; others adopt the tones of dramatic monologue, satirical fable, or occasional address. There are multipart narratives (for instance, Ferdinando and Elvira appears in two parts), persona pieces that take on a point of view (as in At a Pantomime. By a Bilious One), and apostrophes to abstract or public objects (such as To the Terrestrial Globe. By a Miserable Wretch). The forms are verse throughout; there is no prose fiction, diary, or correspondence.
Across the sequence, Gilbert skewers institutions and roles that dominated nineteenth-century life. Clergy, bishops, curates, and missionaries find themselves in absurd predicaments; military and naval figures are lampooned for bravado and bureaucracy; lovers and social climbers are exposed in comic relief. Exotic place names and invented kingdoms, including Rum-Ti-Foo and Chickeraboo, frame satirical encounters with imperial swagger and cultural pretension. The humor often turns on moral inversions, where crimes, follies, and vanities are met with penalties either wildly exaggerated or ironically fitting. The result is a brisk anatomy of status, duty, and propriety, delivered with playful irreverence rather than solemn rebuke.
Stylistically, the ballads combine a buoyant, often anapaestic swing with rapid patter, unexpected internal rhymes, and polysyllabic cadences that mimic the rush of comic song. Gilbert delights in bathos—the fall from grand to trivial—using catalogues, sudden anticlimaxes, and matter-of-fact narrators to puncture pomposity. His coinages and character names are themselves jokes, and he exploits nautical, legal, and ecclesiastical jargon for comic effect. Refrains and running gags knit the pieces together, as do deliberately prosaic morals that undercut any hint of sentimentality. The verse is built for performance on the page: vivid, rhythmic, and precise, but never at the expense of clarity.
As a whole, The Bab Ballads occupy a central place in Gilbert’s oeuvre, illuminating the verbal dexterity and satiric method that later animated his comic theatre. Here one sees the templates of brisk narrative, verbal sparkle, and topsy-turvy logic that would become his hallmark. The ballads also showcase an early, distinctive integration of text and visual wit, since they were originally printed with the author’s own caricatures in Fun. Their compact narratives encode a sophisticated ear for rhythm and an instinct for stage-worthy timing, which helps explain their long afterlife in recitation, anthology, and scholarship devoted to Victorian popular culture.
The settings and attitudes are unmistakably of their period. Readers will encounter topical references, period spellings, and caricatures that reflect Victorian conventions of humor, including depictions and stereotypes that today register as dated or offensive. Noting this context is part of reading them responsibly; it also clarifies what Gilbert is satirizing—pretension, cant, complacency, and the vanity of power—versus what the verse, as a product of its time, takes for granted. Approached with historical awareness, the poems retain their sting and sparkle, allowing modern readers to appreciate both their craft and the cultural world they so deftly lampoon.
This collection is designed for browsing as much as for continuous reading. Each ballad stands independently, yet echoes accumulate: recurring types, stock professions, and imaginary geographies form a comic cosmos with its own logic. A shipboard tale may rhyme with a clerical farce; a romantic idyll may collapse into legalistic quibbles. The organizing pleasure lies in the contrasts of tone and the steady precision of the verse line. Taken together, these pieces offer a lively, self-contained survey of Gilbert’s light-verse art—focused, economical, and inexhaustibly inventive—inviting newcomers and longtime admirers alike to hear again the unmistakable cadence of Bab.
Historical Context
William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911) composed the Bab Ballads while living and working in London, publishing them primarily in the comic weekly Fun between 1865 and the early 1870s. Signed with his childhood nickname 'Bab', the verses and accompanying drawings first appeared to a readership cultivated by editors H. J. Byron and Tom Hood the Younger, rivals to Punch. The first collected Bab Ballads appeared in 1869, with a further series in 1872. Written by a barrister called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1863, the ballads marry legal precision with absurdity, anticipating the later stage craft of Gilbert & Sullivan.
Mid-Victorian London supplied the urban types and institutions that populate these comic narratives: curates, bishops, policemen, busmen, brokers, and theatrical 'supers'. The Metropolitan Police, created in 1829, had by the 1860s become a ubiquitous symbol of authority suitable for affectionate lampoon. The omnibus boom and the Metropolitan Railway (opened 10 January 1863) transformed mobility and social mixing, while Joseph Bazalgette's sewer works, built after the Great Stink of 1858, symbolized civic modernity. The Second Reform Act (1867) broadened the electorate, sharpening class consciousness that Gilbert manipulates by inverting ranks and roles, sending City men to sea and prelates into comic scrapes.
An expanding empire furnished a gallery of exotic backdrops and solemn targets. The aftermath of the Indian Rebellion (1857), the Opium Wars (1839–42; 1856–60), and colonial consolidation in Africa and the Pacific heightened British awareness of distant rulers, missionaries, and administrators, all ripe for satiric relocation to nonsensical realms with sonorous names. The Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1871) institutionalized curiosity about foreign customs, which Gilbert gleefully caricatured. His sham-oriental princes, island potentates, and missionary bishops expose metropolitan complacencies about race and rule while retaining the jaunty sing-song cadences of music-hall chorus.
Religious controversy and credulity were equally fertile. The Oxford Movement (from 1833) and later Ritualist disputes over vestments and ceremony stirred the Church of England throughout the 1860s and 1870s, culminating in the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874). Gilbert's clergymen are consequently earnest yet absurd, their scruples colliding with social ambition or romantic farce. Simultaneously, spiritualism and ghost-seeing, fashionable in Britain from the 1860s and later formalized with the Society for Psychical Research (1882), offered comic possibilities for haunted parsonages and spectral visitants. By treating the sacred and supernatural with the same imperturbable logic, he punctures both pomposity and panic.
The theatre world in which Gilbert worked provides constant subtext. The Theatres Regulation Act (1843) loosened monopolies while preserving censorship by the Lord Chamberlain, shaping a market for burlesque, extravaganza, and pantomime. John Hollingshead's Gaiety Theatre opened on the Strand in 1868, emblematic of a London taste for opulent spoof. Music-hall patter, and the contemporary vogue for the sensation novel and melodrama (Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, 1859; Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, 1862), inflect the ballads' improbable crimes, disguises, and sudden reversals. Gilbert's professional familiarity with actors, supernumeraries, and managers grounds his satire of stage labor and illusion.
The sea, trade, and naval prestige pervade the period and the ballads alike. After the Crimean War (1854–56) and amid imperial policing, the Royal Navy remained a national emblem; merchant shipping tied London to sugar, tea, and cotton circuits handled in the City and at the London Docks. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (1824) and lurid shipwreck journalism created a culture of maritime heroics ripe for burlesque. Gilbert subverts the quarterdeck's gravitas with cannibal yarns, mutinous crews, and punctured bravado, while also lampooning mercantile respectability in brokers and agents whose ledgers cannot save them from topsy-turvy nautical misadventure.
Victorian debates about gender, marriage, and morality supply another frame. The Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) established civil divorce; the Married Women's Property Acts (1870, 1882) altered wives' economic status; campaigns to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts (led by Josephine Butler from 1869) challenged double standards. Against this backdrop, Gilbert's heiresses, dancing girls, and dutiful brides encounter officious guardians, titled roués, and reformers, their courtships negotiated through contracts, ranks, and reputations. The satire exploits the dissonance between sentimental propriety and urban pragmatism, exposing the legalistic treatment of love while refusing either prurience or piety, a balance that kept Fun's mixed readership amused.
Formally, the Bab Ballads are laboratories for the later Savoy operas. Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) first joined Gilbert for Thespis (1871) and triumphantly in Trial by Jury (1875), H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1879), and The Mikado (1885) under Richard D'Oyly Carte (1844–1901), whose Savoy Theatre opened in 1881 as the first public building lit entirely by electricity. The ballads' patter, internal rhymes, and remorseless logic rehearse those libretti, while their stock figures—bishops, bobbies, beaux, and buccaneers—reappear transposed to the stage. Gilbert's 1898 omnibus, The Bab Ballads, with which are included Songs of a Savoyard, confirmed the continuity of page and stage.
Synopsis (Selection)
CAPTAIN REECE
A benevolent sea-captain uses his fortune to improve his crew’s lives and arrange advantageous matches, concluding with a modestly selfless resolution of his own.
THE RIVAL CURATES
Two mild clergymen escalate their doctrinal zeal and public displays to outdo each other for a parishioner’s favor, sending ecclesiastical rivalry into absurdity.
ONLY A DANCING GIRL
A speaker defends a ballet-girl’s character against social snobbery, contrasting public prejudice with private virtue.
GENERAL JOHN
A caricature of a decorated officer whose fame rests on bluster and accident rather than real merit, satirizing martial hero worship.
TO A LITTLE MAID BY A POLICEMAN
A well-meaning constable addresses a child with officious advice and sentimental counsel, humorously blending authority and tenderness.
JOHN AND FREDDY
A brief cautionary tale of two friends whose playful rivalry and pranks drift into trouble with an unexpected sting.
SIR GUY THE CRUSADER
A mock-heroic account of a knight’s crusading exploits that lampoon chivalric ideals through outsized bravado and misadventure.
HAUNTED
A comic ghost story in which a skeptic is pestered by persistent apparitions, turning bravado into sheepish retreat.
THE BISHOP AND THE ’BUSMAN
A bishop debates a busman on doctrine and eternal punishment, only to be disarmed by the driver’s plain, practical logic.
THE TROUBADOUR
A romantic singer’s earnest serenades wreak havoc on those he courts, burlesquing the pretensions of medieval love-song.
FERDINANDO AND ELVIRA; OR, THE GENTLE PIEMAN (Parts I–II)
A two-part burlesque in which devoted lovers, a benevolent pieman, and stock melodrama villains cross paths, producing farcical peril, mistaken identities, and ironic reversals.
LORENZO DE LARDY
A foppish cosmopolitan suitor woos an Englishwoman, his affected manners and borrowed sophistication colliding with plain good sense.
DISILLUSIONED BY AN EX-ENTHUSIAST
A former admirer renounces his idol with dry catalogues of petty flaws, puncturing inflated enthusiasm with bathos.
BABETTE’S LOVE
A sentimental vignette about a young woman’s steadfast affection tested by circumstance, rendered with light, teasing irony.
TO MY BRIDE (WHOEVER SHE MAY BE)
A mock-proposal in which the speaker outlines exacting, whimsical conditions for an unknown future wife.
THE FOLLY OF BROWN By a General Agent
A self-justifying agent recounts an over-credulous client’s speculative disasters, satirizing Victorian get-rich schemes and commercial puffery.
SIR MACKLIN
A comic portrait of a vain social climber whose knightly pretensions are steadily undercut by awkward reality.
THE YARN OF THE “NANCY BELL”
A mariner recounts the grotesquely comic fate of his ship and crew, spiraling into macabre episodes of survival at sea.
THE BISHOP OF RUM-TI-FOO
A colonial bishop candidly admits to pragmatic compromises that keep his distant flock content, skewering missionary zeal and hypocrisy.
THE PRECOCIOUS BABY. A VERY TRUE TALE
An absurd chronicle of an infant prodigy whose implausible talents provoke escalating commotion, lampooning sensational ‘true’ stories.
TO PHŒBE
A brief, playful address to a beloved, mixing earnest affection with arch, self-aware flattery.
BAINES CAREW, GENTLEMAN
The polished facade of a ‘gentleman’ conceals a career of quiet roguery, until his past casts a compromising shadow.
THOMAS WINTERBOTTOM HANCE
The hapless adventures of a timid fellow whose name and nature invite a series of comic disappointments.
THE REVEREND MICAH SOWLS
An unedifying sketch of a self-serving clergyman entangled in petty scandals and clerical small-mindedness.
A DISCONTENTED SUGAR BROKER
A prosperous merchant vents restless dissatisfaction with business and home, dabbling in foolish escapades he quickly regrets.
THE PANTOMIME "SUPER" TO HIS MASK
A backstage monologue from a nameless supernumerary who laments invisibility and thankless toil behind a showy mask.
THE FORCE OF ARGUMENT
Relentless logic is wielded to justify the unreasonable, driving a domestic dispute to a comically perverse conclusion.
THE GHOST, THE GALLANT, THE GAEL, AND THE GOBLIN
Four clashing archetypes collide in a supernatural frolic, their boasts and prejudices unraveling into playful chaos.
THE PHANTOM CURATE. A FABLE
A curate’s spectral status—literal or assumed—exposes social indifference and clerical absurdity, closing on a neat moral.
THE SENSATION CAPTAIN
A publicity-hungry commander orchestrates headline-grabbing exploits, valuing spectacle over seamanship.
TEMPORA MUTANTUR
An ironic meditation on changing times contrasts idealized ‘then’ with the prosaic ‘now,’ deflating nostalgia.
