ABSTRACT
On the Friday of that week, 13 May 1842, Arthur Sullivan was born in Lambeth, South London. The new journalism was one of the features of dramatic social change between the beginning and end of the reign of Queen Victoria, within which fell the whole of Arthur Sullivan’s life. In 1841, the year before Arthur Sullivan’s birth, the first census of the United Kingdom revealed a population which was under 27 million and mainly agricultural. It was indeed into an expanding world of entertainment that Arthur Sullivan grew up. During Sullivan’s lifetime the provision of concerts increased dramatically. The tiny garment labelled as ‘Arthur Sullivan’s first shirt’, with a note in his mother’s hand bearing the date of his birth, rests in the Gilbert and Sullivan collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. On 2 November 1836, her 25th birthday, Mary Clementina Coghlan married Thomas Sullivan, who was born on 4 June in 1805 or 1806.
