to fall in love with people of different social classes. In Pinafore, the captain's daughter, Josephine, loves and is loved by a common sailor, but she dutifully tells him, "your proffered love I haughtily reject". He expresses his devotion to her in a poetic and moving speech that ends with "I am a British sailor, and I love you". It finally turns out that he is of a higher rank than she. This is a parody of the Victorian "equality" drama, such as Lord Lytton's The Lady of Lyons (1838), where the heroine rejects a virtuous peasant who makes a similarly moving speech, ending with "I am a peasant!" It then turns out that he has become her social superior. Furthermore, in Pinafore, Sir Joseph assures Josephine that "love levels all ranks". In Tom Taylor's The Serf, the heroine again loves a worthy peasant who turns out to be of high rank, and she declares happily at the end that "love levels all". In a satire of the libertarian traditions of nautical melodrama, Sir Joseph tells the crew of the Pinafore that they are "any man's equal" (excepting his), and he writes a song for them that glorifies the British sailor. Conversely, he brings the proud captain down a notch by making him "dance a hornpipe on the cabin table". Jones notes that the union between Ralph and Josephine "becomes acceptable only through the absurd second-act revelation of Buttercup's inadvertent switching of the infants" and concludes that Gilbert is a "conservative satirist [who] ultimately advocated preserving the status quo ... [and] set out to show [that] love definitely does not level all ranks". There is a divide among Gilbert and Sullivan scholars as to whether Gilbert is, as Jones argues, a supporter of the status quo whose focus is merely to entertain or, on the other hand, predominantly to satirise and protest "against the follies of his age". The Gilbert scholar Andrew Crowther posits that this disagreement arises from Gilbert's "techniques of inversion – with irony and topsyturvydom", which lead to "the surface meaning of his writings" being "the opposite of their underlying meaning". Crowther argues that Gilbert desires to "celebrate" society's norms while, at the same time, satirising these conventions. In Pinafore, which established many patterns for the later Savoy operas, Gilbert found a way to express his own conflict that "also had tremendous appeal to the general public".