Ko-Ko being a cheap tailor might have meant to a Victorian audience that he was unacceptably socially ambitious, having been not only a worker (a tailor) but somehow undignified (being cheap). It makes his desire to marry Yum-Yum, who is sort of a princess in disguise, inappropriate on class grounds.

Ko-Ko's having been a cheap tailor wouldn't necessarily have made him poor, only cheap -- cheap by Victorian standards, anyway. He's got this palace in town, and while it certainly could have come with his new job as Lord High Executioner, which he's had for only a year, he has apparently been the guardian of the three girls for years. He tells Nanki-Poo he's raised and educated Yum-Yum to marry and to think well of him.

Pitti-Sing wonders if Pooh-Bah accompanies Ko-Ko because he has come to try on some clothing that Ko-Ko must have made.

It is possible that "cheap tailor" was a term with offensive ethnic associations, though I see nothing in the OED that suggests this possible reading. An illustration by Puck from an article, "Pictorial Journalism," from the August 1891 Cosmopolitan, shows a "cheap tailor," clearly working class and probably Jewish, listening to a another man selling advertising in the Sunday paper:

The text reads as follows:

"Vot you vant?"

"I want to publish your portrait and description in our Sunday edition, as one of the Merchant-Princes of the Great city -- for the small sum of two dollars." (Gribayedoff 479)

This discussion is based on the definition of the words cheap and tailor in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which requires a little explanation.

To Act I or Act II of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado.

To the homepage of this Mikado website.

Suggestions, contributions, criticisms, questions? Email Sharon Cogdill.