Robert Smith Surtees was born into a Durham hunting family in 1805,
a typical nineteenth century squire's family dominated by country
sports and country duties. After attending Durham grammar school he was
articled to a solicitor in 1822, moved to London and practised law in a
desultory way.
By 1830, `scribbling' had taken over from the law, and Surtees
contributed regularly to the Sporting Magazine. The following
year he broke with the magazine and with publisher R Ackermann founded
tne New Sporting Magazine, which he was to edit for the next
five years. To this magazine he contributed his comic sketches of Mr
Jorrocks the sporting Cockney grocer, collected as Jorrocks' Jaunts
and Jollities in 1838 with illustrations by Phiz. Jorrocks
reappears in the novel Handley Cross (first published in 1843,
but best known in an edition illustrated by Leech in 1854), now
acknowledged as a classic of the fox-hunting genre, and in Surtees'
opinion `the finest thing I have ever written' In Surtees' lifetime,
however, it was overshadowed by Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour
(1853) a caustic satire which charts the villainous progress of
the obnoxious Mr Soapey Sponge, through English fox-hunting
society.
Surtees' elder brother died in 1831, leaving him heir to Hamsterley
Hall. In 1836 he resigned his editorship and returned home to the life
of a country squire, hunting, shooting, standing for parliament, and
eventually becoming High Sheriff of Durham in 1856. However, he
continued to `scribble', producing another Jorrocks novel,
Hillingdon Hall in 1845, and four further sporting novels. His
last novel, Mr Facey Romford's Hounds (1865) introduced another
great caricature in the person of Mr Romford. An unfinished novel,
Young Tom Hall, was posthumously in 1926.
Throughout his life, Surtees seems to have been faintly embarrassed
by his writing, publishing his novels anonymously, and writing in the
New Sporting Magazine under a pseudonym. However, he was known
and admired by Thackeray, and certainly the most widely read sporting
writer of the times. For the modern reader, his keen sense of the
absurd, his relentless eye for the telling comic detail, his Tristram
Shandyish excursions and acute social observation remain a delight
Above all, no-one has ever written so knowledgeably, and with such
deep attachment, of fox-hunting and its followers.
