Written week by week for the magazine Fun, these ballads tell of Captain Reece and his overindulged crew, rival curates competing in mildness, a lovelorn policeman, and Ferdinando and Elvira’s romance with a pieman. Gilbert chose fifty of the best and illustrated them himself as ‘Bab’.
The topsy-turvy humour that later filled H.M.S. Pinafore and The Mikado starts here. Download the free EPUB.