Foggerty's Fairy and Other Tales
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Foggerty's Fairy and Other Tales is an 1890 book by W. S. Gilbert, collecting several of the short stories and essays he wrote in his early career as a magazine writer. Copyright problems dogged it, and it was pulled from market shortly after its publication. Nonetheless, as few of his stories have been reprinted, and as some of them were used as source material for later plays, it remains popular with those that can get a copy of it.
Contents |
[edit] Contents
Foggerty's Fairy - A series of alternate histories of a somewhat roguish fellow, Freddy Foggerty, who is attempting to escape the consequences of having deserted the army some years previously, after meeting up with his former sergeant, with the help of the titular fairy who allows him to undo events in his past. Unfortunately, though in the main timeline he has overcome his chequered past and become a respectable shop owner, in the alternate histories, he turns out to have become a slave ship captain, a banker about to be arrested for fraud, and so on. Eventually, he returns to the original timeline, and it turns out the sergeant hadn't recognised him, and everything ends happily.
An Elixir of Love - The basis for The Sorcerer, and roughly similar in plot - except, of course, for the status quo not being restored at the end, but Jenny (Aline in the opera), going off with the equivilent of Dr. Daly, and Stanley (Alexis), having to live alone.
Johnny Pounce
Little Mim
The Triumph of Vice
My Maiden Brief
Creatures of Impulse
Maxwell and I
Actors, Authors, and Audiences
Angela
Wide Awake
A Stage Play
The Wicked World
The Finger of Fate
A Tale of a Dry Plate
The Burglar's Story
Unappreciated Shakespeare (From the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, Christmas Number, 1882)[1]
Comedy and Tragedy
Rosencratz and Guildenstern
[edit] Cultural Impact
Besides containing the original sources for the plays Foggerty's Fairy, Creatures of Impulse, Tom Cobb (Wide Awake), The Wicked World, Comedy and Tragedy, and Rosencratz and Guildenstern, and the operas The Sorcerer (An Elixir of Love), and Fallen Fairies (The Wicked World again), some of the stories also served as the basis for a BBC Radio 4 series, "Gilbert without Sullivan". The essay "A Stage Play" is popular among biographers of Gilbert, as it sets out his directoral style in detail.
Peter Haining reprinted some of Foggerty's Fairy and Other Tales in "The Lost Stories of W. S. Gilbert".
[edit] Notes
- ^ Stedman, Jane W., W. S. Gilbert's Theatrical Criticism, page 5.
[edit] References
- Gilbert, W. S. (1890). Foggerty's Fairy and Other Tales. London: George Routledge and Sons.
[edit] See also
- Gilbert, W. S. (1985). Peter Haining, ed.: The Lost Stories of W.S. Gilbert. London(?): Robson Books. ISBN (US) 0-88186-735-X / (Britain) 0-86051-337-8.
[edit] External links
- An earlier version of A Stage Play may be read at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive.
