Robert Smith Surtees

Journalist and novelist, born in The Riding, Northumberland, NE England, UK. He practised as a lawyer, and later became a justice of the peace and High Sheriff of Durham Co. He started the New Sporting Magazine in 1831, where he introduced John Jorrocks, a sporting Cockney, whose later adventures were contained in the highly popular Jorrock's Jaunts and Jollities (1838) and in Hillingdon Hall (1845). His other great character, Mr Soapy Sponge, appears in Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour (1853).

Robert Smith Surtees (1803 - March 16, 1864) was an English editor, novelist and sporting writer.

Educated to be a solicitor, Surtees soon began to contribute to the Sporting Magazine, and in 1831 he published a treatise on the law relating to horses and particularly the law of warranty, entitled The Horseman's Manual.

This humorous narrative of the sporting experiences of a cockney grocer, which suggested the more famous Pickwick Papers of Charles Dickens, is the work by which Surtees is chiefly remembered, though his novel Handley Cross, published in 1843, in which the character of "Jorrocks" is reintroduced as a master of fox-hounds, also enjoyed a wide popularity. The former of these two books was illustrated by "Phiz" (HK Browne), and the latter, as well as most of Surtees's subsequent novels, by John Leech, whose pictures of "Jorrocks" are everywhere familiar and were the chief means of ensuring the lasting popularity of that humorous creation.

In 1838, on the death of his father, Surtees, whose elder brother had died in 1831, inherited the family property of Hamsterley Hall, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Authorities

RS Surtees, Jorrocks's Jaunts and Jollities (London, 1869), containing a biographical memoir of the author WP Frith, John Leech, His Life and Work (2 vols, London, 1891) Samuel Halkett and J Laing, Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain (4 vols, Edinburgh, 1882-1888).