Gilbert and Sullivan or "entertainments", for Thomas German Reed. At a rehearsal for one of these entertainments, "Ages Ago", in 1870, the composer Frederic Clay introduced Gilbert to his friend, the young composer Arthur Sullivan. Over the next year, before the two first collaborated, Gilbert continued to write humorous verse, stories and plays, including the comic operas "Our Island Home" (1870) and "A Sensation Novel" (1871), and the blank verse comedies "The Princess" (1870), "The Palace of Truth" (1870) and "Pygmalion and Galatea" (1871). Sullivan was born in London on 13 May 1842. His father was a military bandmaster, and by the time
Cultural influence of Gilbert and Sullivan as background or imagining the lives of historical or fictional G&S performers. Recent examples include Cynthia Morey's novel about an amateur Gilbert and Sullivan company, "A World That's All Our Own" (2006); Bernard Lockett's "Here's a State of Things" (2007), a historical novel that intertwines the lives of two sets of London characters, a hundred years apart, but both connected with the Gilbert and Sullivan operas; and "The Last Moriarty" (2015) by Charles Veley, about an actress from D'Oyly Carte who seeks the help of Sherlock Holmes. "Secret Words" by Jonathan Strong uses a local production of "Utopia, Limited" as