Bab Ballads - Identification and Attribution

Identification and Attribution

There is no universally agreed list of poems that constitute the Bab Ballads. The series clearly includes all of the poems that Gilbert himself published under that title, but there are others he did not include in any of the collected editions in his lifetime. Most writers have accepted as "Bab Ballads" any poetry (whether illustrated or not) that Gilbert contributed to periodicals, not counting poems written or repurposed as operatic lyrics.

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. Dark & Gray (1923), Goldberg (1929), and Searle (1932) identified and published additional ballads, not all of which have been accepted as canon. The most recent edition, edited by James Ellis (1970), includes all of those that Gilbert himself acknowledged, all of those from Dark & Gray, Goldberg, and/or Searle that Ellis finds authentic, plus others identified by no other previous compilers.

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

Starting with the "new series" of Fun (those with 'n.s.' 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.