Bab Ballads - Early History

Early History

Gilbert himself explained how the Ballads came about:

In 1861 Fun was started, under the editorship of Mr. H. J. Byron. With much labour I turned out an article three-quarters of a column long, and sent it to the editor, together with a half-page drawing on wood. A day or two later the printer of the paper called upon me, with Mr Byron's compliments, and staggered me with a request to contribute a column of 'copy' and a half-page drawing every week for the term of my natural life. I hardly knew how to treat the offer, for it seemed to me that into that short article I had poured all I knew. I was empty. I had exhausted myself: I didn't know any more. However, the printer encouraged me (with Mr. Byron's compliments), and I said I would try. I did try, and I found to my surprise that there was a little left, and enough indeed to enable me to contribute some hundreds of columns to the periodical throughout his editorship, and that of his successor, poor Tom Hood! (Gilbert, 1883).

For ten years Gilbert wrote articles and poems for Fun, of which he was also the drama critic. Gilbert's actual first column "cannot now be identified" (Stedman 1996, p. 11). The first known contribution is a drawing titled "Some mistake here" on page 56 of the 26 October 1861 issue of Fun (Plumb 2004, p. 499). However, some of Gilbert's early work for the journal remains unidentified, because many pieces were unsigned. The earliest pieces that Gilbert himself considered worthy to be collected as Bab Ballads started to appear in 1865, and then much more steadily from 1866–1869.

The series takes its title from the nickname "Bab," which is short for "baby," and may also be an homage to Charles Dickens's pet name, "Boz." Gilbert did not start signing his drawings "Bab" regularly until 1866, and he did not start calling the poems "Bab Ballads" until the first collected edition of them was published in 1869. Thereafter, his new poems in Fun were captioned "The Bab Ballads," and he started numbering them, with "Mister William" (published 6 February 1869) as No. 60.

It is not certain which poems Gilbert considered to be Nos. 1–59. Ellis counts backwards, including only those poems with drawings, and finds that the first Bab Ballad was "The Story of Gentle Archibald" (Ellis 1970, p. 13). However, Gilbert didn't include "Gentle Archibald" in his collected editions, while he did include several poems published earlier than that. Moreover, Gilbert did not limit the collected editions to poems with illustrations.

By 1870, Gilbert's Bab Ballad output started to tail off considerably, corresponding to his rising success as a dramatist. The last poem that Gilbert himself considered to be a Bab Ballad, "Old Paul and Old Tim," appeared in Fun in January 1871. In the remaining forty years of his life, he would make only a handful of verse contributions to periodicals. Some posthumous editions of the Ballads have included these later poems in the canon, although Gilbert did not.