Tom Cobb
or, Fortune's Toy
Book by W. S. Gilbert
Production Runs
Act I - Location: The O’Fipp House
Tom Cobb, a penniless young surgeon, is engaged to Matilda, the daughter of an Irish rogue known as Colonel O’Fipp, whom he also happens to reside with. Tom is in debt to numerous people, and O’Fipp has borrowed money from him in exchange for his daughter’s hand. One of Tom’s lenders has just signed a judgment against him. His pseudo-friend and rival physician, Tim Whipple, has become quite wealthy from his thriving practice, and is soon discovered to also be seeking Matilda’s hand. As a joke, Whipple has named an old friendless pauper patient of his after Tom, and the old man has just died. This presents a solution to all of Tom’s problems. All he has to do is make people think it's young Tom Cobb who has died, lie low for a few months, and come back to life with a new name and a clean slate. Tom seizes the opportunity and leaves immediately. We briefly meet Caroline Effingham, an old school-friend of Matilda's. Caroline, an intensely romantic woman, tells Matilda that she fell in love with a "poet-soldier", whom she has corresponded with but never met. However, he hasn't responded to her letters for some time and when she finds him she will sue him for breach of promise. Before Tom "died," he scribbled a joke Will in which he left all his worldly goods to Matilda. Whipple storms in, saying he’s found a stack of gold under the old pauper’s fireplace, and O’Fipp proposes marrying the Will to the gold.
Act II - Location: The O’Fipp House, Now Finely Furnished
Three months have passed, and Whipple is now engaged to Matilda. Everyone is happy, thanks to the "death" of Tom Cobb, and they agree that if he should decide to return from the dead, he will find it difficult to convince anyone of his identity. When Tom returns, everyone pretends not to recognize him (although he does bear a slight resemblance to their deceased friend). Blinded by desperation and despair, Tom is convinced to take any available name in the newspaper, eventually settling on Major-General Arthur Fitzpatrick, the Colonel securing this arrangement (and Tom’s silence) with promise of payment of a pound a week. The entire Effingham family arrives to see their old friends, the O’Fipps. However, when O’Fipp introduces the newly minted Major-General, the Effinghams recognize the name as that of Caroline’s errant fiancee, and immediately threaten legal action against Tom if he does not agree to marry Caroline. Bereft of any other options, Tom agrees.
Act III - Location: The Effingham’s House
Three more months have passed. Tom has transformed himself, with great effort, into a poet-soldier: he talks exquisitely solemn rubbish. He is, of course, still engaged to Caroline. He doesn't like to deceive her, but he is afraid of telling her who he really is because Docket & Tape, Solicitors, have been advertising in the papers for information about him. Whipple arrives and tells Tom that O'Fipp refuses to pay him his pound a week any more, because he believes that the threat of prosecution for forgery will be enough to keep Tom quiet. However, Tom is a desperate man, and writes a letter to Docket & Tape, confessing everything. But it turns out that they weren't after him for forgery, after all.They have discovered that Tom was, really and truly, the grandson of the old miser Tom Cobb. He is a fabulously wealthy man! Tom is disgusted at the mercenary behaviour of Matilda, his old fiancée, and decides to marry Caroline.
Adapted from the Tom Cobb page of the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive