He wrote a considerable number of novels, biographies, histories, essays (especially about the dangers of alcohol and the plight of the poor) and popular fantasy stories, mostly in the 1860s and 1870s.
Gilbert was born at Bishopstoke, Hampshire, the eldest son of William (1780–1812), a grocer in Commercial Row, Blackfriars, London, and his wife Sarah née Mathers (1782–1810).
[1] Both his parents died of tuberculosis by the time William was seven years old, and thereafter, he and his younger siblings, Joseph and Jane, were raised in London by their mother's sister and her husband, Mary nee Mathers (1770–1865) and John Samuel Schwenck (1780–1861), a childless and financially comfortable couple.
In early 1845, Gilbert decided to take custody of his two young nephews from their mother, Catherine, who had begun a relationship with an officer of the East India Company.
His interest in the poor is evident in his writing, and one of his recurring themes was that poverty and alcohol, not genealogy, was the major cause of crime and the main factor in one's later fortunes.
This theme continued to concern Gilbert throughout his career including in Contrasts; dedicated to the ratepayers of London (1873) and in one of his fiercest attacks on social abuses, The City; An Inquiry into the Corporation, its livery companies, and the administration of their charities and endowments (1877),[7] describing how 50,000 working-class people were evicted from their dwellings to make room for the Metropolitan Railway.
This was made into a play called Mary Warner by Tom Taylor in 1869, who was forced to pay Gilbert a settlement for plagiarising his novel.
Gilbert's next novel, De Profundis, a tale of the social deposits (1864) is the story of a foundling rescued by a Scottish Fusilier Guardsman stationed in London.
[11] Among Gilbert's best-known, and most popular, works were his Innominato tales of the supernatural, published in various magazines, including Argosy, and finally collected in The Wizard of the Mountain (1867).
[12] These stories concerned the adventures of an enigmatic wizard and astrologer called the Innominato (in English, "Nameless"), in 14th century Italy, who tried to use his powers to help people.
King George's Middy (1869), also illustrated by W. S. Gilbert, relates the adventures of a Leicestershire squire's son who becomes a midshipman and is marooned of the coast of Africa.
In this work, Gilbert concluded, after extensive research, that there was no evidence of the acts of gross immorality of which Borgia was accused, including murder.
[14] In 1871, the novel Martha was followed by The Landlord of the "Sun", again describing a descent into degradation, this time involving a villainous seducer, an illegitimate child and drunkenness, and, in 1873, by Clara Levesque.
This was followed in 1881 by Modern Wonders of the World, or the new Sinbad, a series of 10 stories told to London children by Hassan, the son of an Egyptian slave dealer.
His last book, published in 1882, Legion, or the modern demoniac, returns to Gilbert's campaign against drink, which, he illustrated, leads to "crime, profligacy, suicide, homicide, brutality, cruelty, pauperism, idiocy and insanity.