R. S. Surtees
Surtees left for London in 1825, intending to practise law in the capital, but had difficulty making his way and began contributing to the Sporting Magazine.
In 1835, Surtees abandoned his legal practice and, after inheriting Hamsterley Hall in 1838, devoted himself to hunting and shooting, meanwhile writing anonymously for his own pleasure.
He was a friend and admirer of the great hunting man Ralph Lambton, who had his headquarters at Sedgefield, County Durham, the "Melton of the North".
Though Surtees did not set his novels in any readily identifiable locality, he uses North East place-names like Sheepwash, Howell (How) Burn, and Winford Rig.
The famous incident, illustrated by Leech, when Pigg jumps into the melon frame was inspired by a similar episode involving Kirk in Corbridge.
Perhaps Surtees most resembles the Dickens of The Pickwick Papers, which was originally intended as mere supporting matter for a series of sporting illustrations to rival Jorrocks.
"There were Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapey Sponge and Mrs. Asquith's Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all spread open."
Gash notes that George Whyte-Melville's hunting novels were far better selling in their day than Surtees's but are now no longer read and appear sanitised in comparison.
Among a wider public his mordant observations on men, women, and manners; his entertaining array of eccentrics, rakes, and rogues; his skill in the construction of lively dialogue (a matter over which he took great pains); his happy genius for unforgettable and quotable phrases; and above all, his supreme comic masterpiece, Jorrocks, have won him successive generations of devoted followers.
Although his proper place among Victorian novelists is not easy to determine, his power as a creative artist was recognized, among professional writers, by Thackeray, Kipling, Arnold Bennett, and Siegfried Sassoon, and earned the tributes of laymen as distinguished and diverse as William Morris, Lord Rosebery, and Theodore Roosevelt.
