Robert Smith Surtees

Robert Smith Surtees , 1803-64, English novelist. He created John Jorrocks, the sporting grocer, who appears in Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities (1838), a series of humorous sketches first published in the New Sporting Magazine, which Surtees had helped to found in 1831. The novel Handley Cross (1843) continued the career of Jorrocks. Surtees's other novels include Hawbuck Grange (1847), Hillingdon Hall (1845), Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour (1853), Ask Mamma (1858), Plain or Ringlets? (1860), and Mr. Facey Romford's Hounds (1865). Surtees knew English hunting life well, and his books have a tone of lusty humor and hearty satire. Many of his sketches were enhanced by the spirited illustrations of John Leech.

Bibliography: See Hunting Scenes from Surtees (comp. by L. Gough, 1953).

Surtees, Robert Smith (1805–64), founded, with R. Ackermann the younger, the New Sporting Magazine in 1831, to which he contributed his comic sketches of Mr Jorrocks, the sporting Cockney grocer, later collected as Jorrock's Jaunts and Jollities (1838). Jorrocks, whose adventures to some extent suggested the original idea of Pickwick Papers, reappears in Handley Cross (1843; expanded and illustrated by Leech, 1854). His second great character, Mr Soapey Sponge, appears in Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour (1853); another celebrated character was Mr Facey Romford, who appears in his last novel, Mr Facey Romford's Hounds (1865). His eight long novels deal mainly with the characteristic aspects of English fox-hunting society, but his vivid caricatures, the absurd scenes he describes, the convincing dialect and often repeated catch-phrases, distinguish him from other writers of this genre. The illustration of his novels by Leech, Alken, and ‘Phiz’ ( H. K. Browne) also contributed to their success.