Gilbert Arthur à Beckett

Gilbert Arthur à Beckett (1837 – October 15, 1891) was an English writer.

Beckett was born at Portland House Hammersmith, on 7 April 1837, the eldest son of the civil servant and humorist Gilbert Abbott à Beckett and the composer Mary Anne à Beckett, daughter of Joseph Glossop, clerk of the cheque to the hon. corps of gentlemen-at-arms. His brother was Arthur William à Beckett. He graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, as a Westminster scholar in 1860. He was entered at Lincoln's Inn on 15 October 1857, but gave his attention chiefly to drama, producing Diamonds and Hearts at the Haymarket Theatre in 1867; this was followed by other light comedies. His adaptation of a French operetta by Émile Jonas called The Two Harlequins opened the new Gaiety Theatre, London in 1868, together with his distant cousin, W. S. Gilbert's, Robert the Devil and another piece.

Beckett's pieces include numerous burlesques and pantomimes, the libretti of Savonarola (Hamburg, 1884) and The Canterbury Pilgrims (Drury Lane, 1884) for the music of Dr. C. V. Stanford. With the composer Alfred Cellier, Beckett wrote the operetta Two Foster Brothers (St. George's Hall, 1877).

In 1879, he had been asked by Tom Taylor, the editor of Punch, to follow the example of his younger brother Arthur, and become a regular member of the staff of Punch. Three years later he was 'appointed to the Table.' The Punch dinners 'were his greatest pleasure, and he attended them with regularity, although the paralysis of the legs, the result of falling down the stairway of Gower Street station, rendered his locomotion, and especially the mounting of Mr. Punch's staircase, a matter of painful exertion'. To Punch he contributed both prose and verse; he wrote, in greater part, the admirable parody of a boy's sensational shocker (March 1882), and he developed Jerrold's idea of humorous bogus advertisements under the heading 'How we advertise now.' The idea of one of Sir John Tenniel's best cartoons for Punch, entitled 'Dropping the Pilot,' illustrative of Bismarck's resignation in 1889, was due to him.

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