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This work is the third in a series of six one-act musical plays written by Gilbert for Thomas German Reed and his wife Priscilla between 1869 and 1875.

The German Reeds presented respectable, family-friendly musical entertainments at their Gallery of Illustration beginning in 1855, at a time when the theatre in Britain had gained a poor reputation as an unsavory institution and was not attended by much of the middle class.

Shakespeare was played, but most of the entertainments consisted of poorly translated French operettas, risque Victorian burlesques and incomprehensible broad farces.

[1] The Gallery of Illustration was a 500-seat theatre with a small stage that only allowed for four or five characters with accompaniment by a piano, harmonium and sometimes a harp.

[1] This work introduced a number of the characters that Gilbert would use consistently in his later operas, including the overbearing, mature contralto and the meek, submissive baritone.

Also, he is affected by so keen a sense of duty as an apprenticed pirate that he is prepared to slaughter his own parents until the discovery of the passage of his twenty-first birthday frees him from his articles of indenture.