Bab Ballads

In writing these verses Gilbert developed his "topsy-turvy" style in which the humour is derived by setting up a ridiculous premise and working out its logical consequences, however absurd.

Gilbert wrote most of the "ballads", and first published a collection of them in book form, before he became famous for his comic opera librettos written in collaboration with the composer Arthur Sullivan.

The earliest pieces that Gilbert himself considered worthy to be collected in The Bab Ballads started to appear in 1865, and then much more steadily from 1866 to 1869.

Ellis counts backwards, including only those poems with drawings, and finds that the first Bab Ballad was "The Story of Gentle Archibald".

In 1890 Gilbert produced Songs of a Savoyard, a volume of sixty-nine detached lyrics from the Savoy Operas, each with a new title, and some of them slightly reworded to fit the changed context.

The Bab Ballads and the illustrated opera lyrics alternated, creating the impression of one integrated body of work.

Gilbert also added more than two hundred new drawings, providing illustrations for the ten ballads that had previously lacked them, and replacing most of the others.

After Gilbert's death there were several attempts to identify additional ballads that were missing from the collected editions that had been published to that point.

There are several ballads that Ellis identifies as Gilbert's either on stylistic grounds or by the presence of a "Bab" illustration accompanying the poem in the original publication.

These include two distinct poems called "The Cattle Show", as well as "Sixty-Three and Sixty-Four", "The Dream", "The Baron Klopfzetterheim" and "Down to the Derby".

These attributions are provisional and have not been accepted by all scholars because the poems themselves are unsigned, and Gilbert sometimes provided illustrations for the work of other writers.

in the source reference), Gilbert's authorship is not in doubt, as the pieces for which he was paid can be confirmed from the proprietors' copies of that journal, which now reside in the Huntington Library.

Some of the Bab Ballads have been recorded by several performers, including Stanley Holloway (1959)[9] Redvers Kyle (1963)[10] and Jim Broadbent (1999).