Princess Ida, or Castle Adamant by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan was originally produced at the Savoy Theatre under the management of Richard D’Oyly Carte on Saturday 5th January 1884 until Saturday 16th August 1884, and from Monday 15th September until Thursday 9th October 1884.

Agreeing on a new subject after Iolanthe proved difficult. Gilbert suggested his ‘magic lozenge’ plot in which characters magically transformed themselves by swallowing one - the idea he had used for his 1873 play The Wicked World. Sullivan wanted a story of more human interest, and eventually agreed on Princess Ida, Gilbert’s ‘respectful perversion’ of Tennyson’s 1847 narrative poem The Princess that Gilbert had previously dramatized in The Princess, staged at the Olympic Theatre in January 1870. Set in Castle Adamant where Princess Ida, the daughter of the crotchety King Gama, runs a women’s college, Princess Ida was a satire on women’s education, a controversial subject in 1847 when Queen’s College opened in London, and in 1870, the year after the establishment of Girton College, Cambridge. The only Gilbert and Sullivan three act opera, and the only one in blank verse, it contains some of Sullivan’s most operatic music but did not enjoy the lasting success of their previous works and was not revived in London during D’Oyly Carte’s management.

A new production of Princess Ida opened at The Savoy Theatre on 27th September 1954. Since the previous costumes and sets had been destroyed in an air raid that hit the D’Oyly Carte’s south London store during the Second World War, Rupert D’Oyly Carte commissioned new designs from James Wade. A review in The Sphere, 2nd October 1954 praised the ‘romantic and faery beauty’ of the new designs that recovered: ‘the fabulous dreamlike poem by Tennyson on which the opera is based’.

In 1955 the designer Peter Goffin was brought in to create a ‘unit set’ – a framework on which the sets for all the operas could be easily mounted and changed for touring purposes. The Princess Ida set by Wade was one of the sets that Goffin adapted to fit the unit set, along with others including sets for The Yeoman of the Guard, Patience and The Mikado that he redesigned in 1938, 1857 and 1958 respectively. In 1955 Goffin redesigned the costume for Princess Ida to be worn by Muriel Harding on the tour, possibly because she did not like the original designed by James Wade and worn by Victoria Sladen at the Savoy Theatre in 1954.

James Wade ordered three dozen of these cards from Dame Bridget D'Oyly Carte because they showed a costume he designed for the production.