The obstinately long-lived popularity of Gilbert and Sullivan’s light operas has often been called a symptom of our nostalgia for things Victorian—and so Ian Bradley calls it in his massive new compilation. We crave, it is claimed, a simpler age: a time of innocence (for which read “asexuality” and “fun poked at slant-eyed foreigners”). All I can say is God help the historian who looks to H.M.S. Pinafore or The Mikado for precise reflections of their times. Gilbert, the deviser of plots for the Savoy operas, habitually viewed his times in a distorting mirror as grotesque as Lewis Carroll’s vision of Wonderland. Exaggerating the absurdities of Victorian Britain, he rendered them curiouser and curiouser.
And so Patience creates a far more precious and affected aesthetic movement than Oscar Wilde and the Pre-Raphaelites ever embodied in person. (Indeed, it was Gilbert’s business partner Richard D’Oyly Carte who sent Wilde on his tour of American mining camps, a tour meant as advance advertising for the opera.) Gilbert’s penchant for caricature may be seen in those Savoy operas that turn England inside-out. In Iolanthe, Strephon, whom the Fairy Queen has made a leader of both Tories and Liberals, calls for a competitive examination to select peers, and thus revolutionize the House of Lords by strengthening its brainpower. In another bouleversement, the Pirates of Penzance are portrayed as upright and virtuous; the rest of the world, corruptible.
Throughout his career, as a critic summed it up in 1888,
