Old Days in Bohemian London (Recollections of Clement Scott)

Abstract

For his Bab Ballads, his fairy plays, and his fantastic ‘books of the words’, we owe Gilbert many thanks, but there is one debt in particular, outside all the others, for which we should sometimes be quite grateful.

Clement William Scott (1841–1904) wrote witty and slashing reviews of plays for The Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Weekly Dispatch and Fun. He was also the author of travel books, adaptations of French farces and humorous sketches. His censure of Broken Hearts (he sometimes referred to it as Broken Parts) angered Gilbert, who believed the play to contain more of the ‘real’ him than anything he had written, and who conceded only that Gretchen was an equal favourite, perhaps because he had taken immense pains in the writing of it. Nevertheless, Scott frequently praised Gilbert’s plays whenever he believed they possessed merit. The rancour with which Gilbert spoke of Scott (‘I bear no ill-will towards you’, he wrote to Scott 26 years after the Broken Hearts flare-up, ‘but I have an excellent memory’) dissipated only at the time of Scott’s fatal illness, as recounted here by Scott’s widow.