Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1881 operetta fits nicely with our idea of the librettist as old curmudgeon: a grumpy satire on willowy, long-haired young men mincing about London being intense and arty, and turning the heads of idiotic girls. Naturally, the “poets” in question turn out to be frauds of the first water, motivated by pure self-love. Male vanity, female silliness: it is an old story.

Still, it seems there was a bit of clamour in artistic circles to be thought the model for these preposterous characters: Wilde, Whistler, Swinburne, Rossetti all claimed Bunthorne was based on them; Wilde ostentatiously booked a box at the theatre for the first performance.

W.S. Gilbert is a peculiar satirist who makes fun of everyone without any self-righteousness. Fraudulence and fakery are his lodestar, but he doesn’t condemn them: we are all charlatans, he implies; the best we can hope for is to get away with it for a while. The trick he and Arthur Sullivan pulled was to pretend to pander to the audience’s philistinism while surreptitiously slipping real art, or something like it, beneath their guard.