Robert Smith Surtees Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes
OverviewRobert Smith Surtees (c. 1805 to c. 1864) was an English novelist and sporting writer whose comic portraits of the hunting field and of the emergent middle classes gave him a lasting place in nineteenth-century literature. Best known as the creator of the unforgettable Mr. Jorrocks, he combined a close knowledge of provincial society with a sharp ear for dialect and a painterly eye for motion, costume, and countryside. Though the metropolitan world of letters often overlooked him in favor of more overtly urban or moralizing novelists, readers in town and country alike prized his books for their humor, their realism about money and manners, and their affectionately satirical view of human foibles.
Early Life and Background
Surtees belonged to a long-established northern family and grew up in County Durham, a region where the rhythms of estate management and field sports were part of daily life. The countryside and the social world surrounding the hunt provided the stores of observation that later fed his fiction. He trained for the law as a young man, an education that taught him the cadences of formal speech, the intricacies of contract and obligation, and the hypocrisies of polite society. Although he worked in the legal world for a time, his tastes pulled toward writing, and he began to contribute to periodical literature with a focus on sporting subjects that he knew at first hand.
Journalism and the New Sporting Magazine
By the early 1830s Surtees helped shape a new kind of sporting journalism through his involvement with the New Sporting Magazine. In essays, sketches, and serial episodes he found a lively audience for tales of the chase that were not simply manuals of hound and horse but comedies of character and class. He wrote within a tradition associated with the famed sporting commentator Charles James Apperley, known as Nimrod, but Surtees distinctly broadened that field: instead of limiting himself to elite turf and chase, he folded in shopkeepers, upstarts, impecunious squires, and the busy world of traders and professionals who longed to be thought sporting. These early efforts established his tone and introduced figures who would mature into the fully realized characters of his novels.
The Creation of Mr. Jorrocks
Surtees's decisive leap came with the creation of John Jorrocks, a Cockney grocer whose love of hunting outstrips his horsemanship and his grasp of country etiquette. Mr. Jorrocks first appeared in magazine pieces that were quickly recognized for their energy and comic verve. Collected as Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities, these narratives turned the grocer into a type: brash, warm-hearted, aspirational, and endlessly quotable. The sketches balanced slapstick with social observation, making light of Jorrocks's malapropisms while revealing the transactional nature of status in a society where cash, not pedigree alone, opened doors. Illustrators such as Henry Thomas Alken gave the early Jorrocks episodes a vivid visual frame, helping readers fix the scene and the man; the pairing of lively prose and spirited plates proved essential to Surtees's popular appeal.
Major Novels and Themes
Surtees developed his method across a run of mid-century books. Handley Cross carried Mr. Jorrocks into fresh predicaments and is often cited as his most complete panorama of provincial hunting society. Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour centers on the enterprising Soapey Sponge, who trades on charm, credit, and borrowed mounts to move through the shires; it is both a road book and a comedy of imposture. Ask Mamma and Plain or Ringlets? extend Surtees's attention beyond the meet and the covertside into drawing rooms, race meetings, and the delicate negotiations of courtship, inheritance, and reputation. His final hunting chronicle, Mr. Facey Romford's Hounds, appeared posthumously and continued his exploration of swagger, speculation, and the commercialization of sport.
Across these books Surtees wrote keenly about money. He returned again and again to bills coming due, to precarious credit, to the social leverage of ready cash and the traps of display. He delighted in vulgar magnificence and in rustic plain dealing, caricaturing the connoisseurship of saddles and stables as deftly as he did the pretensions of self-made men. His dialogue crackles with dialects that mark region and rank, and his narrative voice shuttles between genial omniscience and crisp aside, an approach that lets readers both laugh at and sympathize with strivers and snobs alike.
Illustrators, Publishers, and Literary Circles
Surtees's partnership with leading illustrators intensified his reach. John Leech, celebrated for his work in Punch and for his designs to accompany Charles Dickens, became the principal visual interpreter of the Surtees world. Leech's plates capture plunging hedges, sprawling tumbles, and sly social observation with equal deftness, and his fame drew additional readers to the books issued in monthly parts. Hablot Knight Browne, known as Phiz, also contributed to editions of Surtees's works, while earlier volumes owed much to the hunting scenes of Henry Thomas Alken. The publishers Bradbury and Evans, prominent figures in Victorian print culture, managed several of the part-issues; the alignment of Surtees with their list placed him amid the era's central channels of popular fiction and illustration.
Although not a habitué of London salons, Surtees occupied a cultural neighborhood adjacent to major novelists. Through shared illustrators and publishers, his books reached some of the same public as Dickens and Thackeray, and critics later noted how his brand of comedy complemented the larger Victorian preoccupation with class mobility and moral performance. He was read by hunting men for his accuracy and by general readers for his farce, a dual audience that sustained his career.
Country Squire and Public Service
Unlike many professional writers of his century, Surtees remained rooted in country life. He managed his affairs as a northern squire, kept close to local society, and knew magistrates' benches and market towns as well as meets and martingales. His public standing culminated in service as High Sheriff of Durham in the 1850s, a ceremonial office that reflected both family station and personal respect. The responsibilities of landownership and county duty gave him an intimate acquaintance with the everyday operations of rural governance, a knowledge that surfaces in his wry depictions of parish dignitaries, petty officials, and the informal power of custom.
Working Habits and Personality
Contemporaries and later readers discerned in Surtees a temperament that was observant, practical, and reticent about self-display. He preferred to let characters speak; he was rarely tempted by authorial sermonizing. The self-possession of a man who divided his time between desk and saddle can be felt in the measured construction of his plots and in his moderation of tone: he knows when to allow a scene to build through absurd repetitions and when to puncture pretension with a single blunt statement. While his books revel in mishaps, they avoid cruelty; ridicule tends to land on the puffed-up rather than the vulnerable.
Later Years and Death
Surtees continued to publish through the 1850s and early 1860s, refining familiar materials rather than chasing new fashions. The later novels, handsome in their illustrated parts, show a seasoned writer confident in his comic machinery yet still alert to shifts in the country's social fabric as railways and commerce pressed on old patterns. He died in 1864, and Mr. Facey Romford's Hounds, issued after his death, affirmed both the durability of his readership and the felicity of the collaboration with John Leech, whose images had become inseparable from the text.
Legacy and Influence
In the decades after his death, Surtees's reputation rose and fell with the fortunes of field sports. Yet beyond the saddle and the cover, his books kept a hold as documents of manners. Novelists, critics, and historians recognized in him a chronicler of the claim that money makes gentlemen, of the traffic between shop and shire, and of the comic contradictions of Englishness. The palpable sense of mud, weather, and risk anchors the exhilarating episodes, while the ledgers of tradesmen and the debts of ambitious young men tether the comedy to consequence.
The people who helped form Surtees's world remain part of his legacy. John Leech's plates guide how generations have imagined Jorrocks and his peers; Phiz and Henry Thomas Alken supplied alternative lenses through which to view the same stage. Publishers such as Bradbury and Evans made his serial method viable, aligning text and image in a format friendly to a broad public. Sporting writers like Nimrod created the field into which Surtees wrote, but it was Surtees who fused that lore with the energy of the Victorian novel. For modern readers, his achievement lies in the durable life of his characters, the precision of his social satire, and the enduring good humor with which he portrays a society perpetually scrambling for a good run, a good marriage, or a good account at the end of the season.
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