Bab Ballads - Subsequent Publication

Subsequent Publication

By 1868, Gilbert's poems had won sufficient popularity to justify a collected edition. He selected forty-four of the poems (thirty-four of them illustrated) for an edition of The “Bab” Ballads – Much Sound and Little Sense. A second collected edition, More “Bab” Ballads, including thirty-five ballads (all illustrated), appeared in 1872.

In 1876, Gilbert collected fifty of his favourite poems in Fifty “Bab” Ballads, with one poem being collected for the first time ("Etiquette") and twenty-five poems that had appeared in the earlier volumes being left out. As Gilbert explained it:

The period during which they were written extended over some three or four years; many, however, were composed hastily, and under the discomforting necessity of having to turn out a quantity of lively verse by a certain day in every week. As it seemed to me (and to others) that the volumes were disfigured by the presence of these hastily written impostors, I thought it better to withdraw from both volumes such Ballads as seemed to show evidence of carelessness or undue haste, and to publish the remainder in the compact form under which they are now presented to the reader. (Gilbert 1876, p. vii).

Gilbert's readers were not happy with the loss, and in an 1882 edition Gilbert published all of the poems that had appeared in either The “Bab” Ballads or More “Bab” Ballads, once again excluding "Etiquette." (Some twentieth-century editions of More “Bab” Ballads included "Etiquette," although Gilbert had not done so.)

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 account for the changed context. Many of them also received "Bab" illustrations in the familiar style. He also included two deleted lyrics from Iolanthe (footnoted as "omitted in representation"). The effect was that of a new volume of Bab Ballads. Indeed, Gilbert had entertained calling the volume The Savoy Ballads (Ellis 1970, p. 27, n. 53).

Finally, in 1898, Gilbert produced The “Bab” Ballads with which are included Songs of a Savoyard. This volume included all of the Bab Ballads that had appeared in any of the earlier collected volumes, the sixty-nine "Songs of a Savoyard" from the 1890 volume, and eighteen additional lyrics in the same format from the four new operas he had written since then. The Bab Ballads and illustrated opera lyrics alternated, creating the impression of one integrated body of work.

For the 1898 volume, Gilbert also added over two hundred new drawings, providing illustrations for the ten ballads that had previously lacked them, and replacing most of the others. He wrote:

I have always felt that many of the original illustrations to "The Bab Ballads" erred gravely in the direction of unnecessary extravagance. This defect I have endeavoured to correct through the medium of the two hundred new drawings which I have designed for this volume. I am afraid I cannot claim for them any other recommendation. (Gilbert 1897).

It was in this form that the Ballads remained almost constantly in print through the expiration of the copyright at the end of 1961. James Ellis's new edition in 1970 restored the original drawings, retaining from the 1898 edition only those drawings that went with the previously unillustrated ballads.