At one extraordinary point in Pinafore Gilbert describes the material inequalities of late Victorian life in some detail:

On the one hand, papa's luxurious home...       
          Rich oriental rugs, luxurious sofa pillows,
          And everything that isn't old, from Gillow's.
          And on the other, a dark and dingy room,
               In some back street with stuffy children crying,
          Where organs yell, and clacking housewives fume,
               And clothes are hanging out all day a-drying.
          With one cracked looking-glass to see your face in,
          And dinner served up in a pudding basin!

Surely Gilbert's most biting attack on social inequality is in Strephon's song (cut from the production, presumably because of the nature of the material in it) in IOLANTHE?   I put it back when I produced Iolanthe many long years ago. Oddly enough it picks up "hygiene, health care, housing and education" as its topics!  There's an open, festering anger in this that I don't find elsewhere in his work...  Sullivan's setting certainly didn't shrink from the text..  the last line rises to a held top note on Fagin's name.

Fold your flapping wings,
               Soaring legislature.
          Stoop to little things,
               Stoop to human nature.
          Never need to roam
               members patriotic.
          Let's begin at home,
               Crime is no exotic.
          Bitter is your bane
               Terrible your trials
          Dingy Drury Lane
               Soapless Seven Dials.
          Take a tipsy lout
               Gathered from the gutter,
          Hustle him about,
               Strap him to a shutter.
          What am I but he,
               Washed at hours stated.
          Fed on filagree,
               Clothed and educated
          He's a mark of scorn
               I might be another
          If I had been born
               Of a tipsy mother.
          Take a wretched thief,
               Through the city sneaking.
          Pocket handkerchief
               Ever, ever seeking.
          What is he but I
               Robbed of all my chances
          Picking pockets by
               force of circumstances
                    I might be as bad,
                         As unlucky, rather,
                    If I'd only had,
                         Fagin for a father.

And it's another reference to Seven Dials as a pit of poverty (other, that is, than the one later in the same opera in "Spurn not the nobly born").  As it happens, I was just walking round that area the other day and musing on how it no longer deserves Gilbert's snooty references, whereas the bit of London where I live - which also earns a condescending Gilbertian reference in an earlier opera - is still yet to become a bower, and my neighbouring area yet to become an Arcadian vale...

Seven Dials figures in Disraeli's Sybyl, so it had a reputation.

18 months ago I read David Cannadine's Decline and Fall of the English Aristocracy.  I devoured it for the Mitfordesque gossip, but I can believe Ian Pace would applaud its academic thoroughness and social conclusions.

In it Cannandine spends some time analyzing the duet of the Duke and Duchess in The Gondoliers, and reckons it exactly describes how some aristocrats at the time carried on with the disappearance of their political power and wealth:

Duke: Foundation stone laying / I find very paying. / It adds a large sum to the makings.  At charity dinners / the best of speech spinners / I get ten percent of the takings.

Duchess: I write letters blatant / on medicines patent / and use any other you mustn't.  And vow my complexion / derives its perfection / from somebody's soap, which it doesn't.

Here is precise social satire, although musically it is uninteresting - one of Sullivan's jog trots where he knew the words were all important.

I'm not familiar with this duet, but these lines are marvellous.

Anyone new to this thread or to the world of G&S operettas may like to visit this website:

http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/index.html

where you can read all the lyrics and lots more - this is from their intro:

"Welcome to the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, which is devoted to the operas and other works of  W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, and to other light operas of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Archive, which was established in September 1993, includes a variety of G&S related items, including clip art, librettos, plot summaries, pictures of the original G&S stars, song scores, midi and mpeg audio files, and newsletter articles."

To answer your two questions, Don B, yes I did worship at the shrine of Bacchus that night (although it hasn't taken me this long to recover) and I do read the Guardian, although nothing should necessarily be inferred about my politics from that fact. But although I suspect that G&S appeals more to Daily Telegraph readers (I read The Sunday Telegraph) anyone who wants to speculate about the average Savoyard should remember that G&S continues to be very popular in the USA.

Getting back to the Strephon song, it seems that Gilbert's belief that nurture is far more important than nature in determining a person's character is something that runs through much of his work. His last work, The Hooligan, is a serious play about a man awaiting execution in a prison cell who reflects on how his upbringing contributed to his fate. He makes fun of the fact that birth alone shapes character when Rackstraw turns out to be the rightful captain in Pinafore.

On a less serious note, I had always thought that Gilbert had blundered in Pirates when the chorus of women decide to paddle in the sea, remembering that act one takes place on February 28th. But with the sunny month we've been having so far, perhaps global warming isn't a new thing.

(He did get it wrong, though, when he said that Frederic would come of age in 1940, as he forgot that 1900 would not be a leap year. Another oddity is that when Queen Victoria died, he changed the words from "Queen Victoria's name" to "Good King Edward's name" towards the end, without updated the details of Frederic's birth.)

But the thing is, if the action is supposed to take place in 1873, then the Major General would not be able to "whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore", as that show did not premiere until 1878.