by Daniel Hathaway
It’s been a good thing for the creative team of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan that Victorian England was rife with unqualified public officials, rigid class distinctions, and social inequality. What would the plot of H.M.S. Pinafore, one of their most popular Savoy Operas, have been like without the opportunity to lampoon such functionaries as W. H. Smith, a politician with no nautical experience, by portraying him as Sir Joseph Porter, the First Lord of the Admiralty? His advice: