A London-based French critic described the piece as "", and The Theatre called the story "pure and true and elevated". However, when George Eliot attended a performance of the play shortly after the opening night, her husband recorded in his diary, "Wretched stuff, poorly acted". The author Walter Sichel commented that Gilbert himself would have laughed at the play, had it not been his own: "It tends occasionally to touch on the genre which Gilbert so often satirised."
