Complete Works of R S Surtees

by R S Surtees

  Now, anybody who knows anything of mines, gold, lead, tin, coal, or any other sort, knows that of all ravenous, consuming, insatiable maws, there is nothing to equal the appetite of a mine. The Mint itself would hardly appease the cravings of a bad one; and old Gullington’s was the worst of the bad. It would make our arms ache to copy the outlay and expense he had been at — the boring and sinking, the steam-engines, pumps, boilers, balance-bobs, steam-whims and stamping-engines, the changing-houses, smiths’ and carpenters’ shops, counting-houses, captains’ and engineers’ houses, assay-offices, powder-magazines, covered saw-pits, forges, turning lathes; cottages for fifteen hundred workmen — all on the “Grand Gullington Consol and Aggrandizement Mines,” as he called them. Suffice it to say that the manor or lordship of Wingway Towers and the noble estate of Light-come-lightgo, &c., &c., were soon thrust underground, and that between the time of making his will and the proving of it, Simon Gullington had got rid of five-sixths of his property. And, his sound and disposing mind being seriously affected by the unfortunate turn his affairs had taken, his rather declining body soon followed his money underground.

  The executors, as usual, walked in, and finding the affairs in a state of glorious confusion, washed their hands of them with all convenient speed, selling engines, boilers, kibble-plates, old copper, lead, brass, wood, iron, timber, coals, rope and the Lord knows what. Which, after deducting the funeral testamentary and executors’ expenses, left about a thousand a year, £500 of which was bespoke for the housekeeper, leaving a poor five hundred for the four Miss Gullingtons and their four devoted husbands!

  NOTE.

  SCENE. THE AUTHOR pacing up and down his den, rubbing his hands with glee at having finished the article, and considering how he shall spend the £100 he is to have for writing it.

  Enter, PRINTER’S DEVIL. Please, Sir, Mr Ainsworth says he doesn’t think the story all square, because the ladies were living in a fine house with werandahs and a butler and powdered Johnny; and he doesn’t think it could be done for the money.

  Author. My compliments to Mr Ainsworth, and tell him the ladies were living in the back of the house, and the servants belonged to the lodger in front — and tell Mr Ainsworth the reason why the old boy didn’t marry his housekeeper was that he found his affairs were rather declining, and he thought it was time to be prudent.

  Printer’s Devil (aside). Oh my! That’s just why he should; then he’d have got her for nothing.

  The Biography

  The City of Durham. Surtees spent most of his life at nearby Hamsterley Hall, but had close ties with the city, becoming High Sheriff in 1856.

  Brief Biography: R. S. Surtees by Thomas Seccombe

  From ‘Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 55’

  ROBERT SMITH SURTEES (1803–1864), sporting novelist, of an old Durham family, was the second son of Anthony Surtees (d. 1838) of Hamsterley Hall, who married, on 14 March 1801, Alice, sister of Christopher Blackett of Wylam, M.P. for south Northumberland 1837–1841. His grandfather, Robert Surtees (1741–1811), was of Milkwell Burn in the parish of Ryton, an estate purchased by his ancestor, Anthony Surtees, in 1626; the estate of Hamsterley Hall was acquired about 1807 from the executors of Thomas, eldest surviving son of Henry Swinburne [q. v.] the traveller (cf. Surtees, Durham, ii. 290).

  Born in 1803, Robert was educated at Durham grammar school, which he left in 1819 for a solicitor’s office. Having qualified as a solicitor, he bought a partnership in London; but the business was misrepresented, and he had difficulty in recovering the purchase money. He took rooms in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and began contributing to the old ‘Sporting Magazine.’ During 1830 he compiled a manual for horse-buyers, in which he combined his knowledge of the law with his taste for sporting matters. In 1831 his elder brother, Anthony, died unmarried at Malta on 24 March, thus materially altering his prospects. Before the close of the same year, in conjunction with Rudolph Ackermann [q. v.], he started the ‘New Sporting Magazine,’ which Surtees edited down to 1836. Between July 1831 and September 1834 he developed in these pages the humorous character of Mr. John Jorrocks, a sporting grocer, the quintessence of Cockney vulgarity, good humour, absurdity, and cunning. The success of the sketches led to the conception of a similar scheme by Chapman and Seymour, which resulted in the ‘Pickwick Papers.’ The papers of Surtees were collected as ‘Jorrocks’s Jaunts’ in 1838, in which year, by the death of his father on 5 March, Surtees succeeded to the estate of Hamsterley Hall. He became a J.P. for Durham, a major of the Durham militia, and high sheriff of the county in 1856. In the meantime, Lockhart, having seen the ‘Jorrocks Papers,’ suggested to a common friend, ‘Nimrod’ (i.e. Charles James Apperley), that Surtees ought to try his hand at a novel. The result was ‘Handley Cross,’ in which Jorrocks reappears as a master of foxhounds and the possessor of a county seat. The coarseness of the text was redeemed in 1854 by the brilliantly humorous illustrations of John Leech, who utilised a sketch of a coachman made in church as his model for the ex-grocer. Some of Leech’s best work is to be found among his illustrations to Surtees’s later novels, notably ‘Ask Mamma’ and ‘Mr. Romford’s Hounds.’ Without the original illustrations these works have very small interest. At the time of his death Surtees had just prepared for appearance in serial parts his last novel, ‘Mr. Facey Romford’s Hounds.’ Leech himself died during its issue, and the illustrations were completed by Hablot K. Browne (‘Phiz’). The novelist was a keen observer, very tall, but a good horseman, who, ‘without ever riding for effect, usually saw a deal of what hounds were doing.’ He died at Brighton on 16 March 1864.

  Surtees married, on 19 May 1841, Elizabeth Jane (d. 1879), daughter and coheir of Addison Fenwick of Bishop Wearmouth, and had issue Anthony, who died at Rome on 17 March 1871; and two daughters, Elizabeth Anne and Eleanor, who married, on 28 Jan. 1885, John Prendergast Vereker, heir to the viscounty of Gort.

  Surtees wrote: 1. ‘The Horseman’s Manual, being a Treatise on Soundness, the Law of Warranty, and generally on the Laws relating to Horses. By R. S. Surtees, Lincoln’s Inn Fields,’ London, 1831, 8vo. 2. ‘Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities, or the Hunting, Shooting, Racing, Driving, Sailing, Eating, Eccentric and Extravagant Exploits of that renowned Sporting Citizen, Mr. John Jorrocks of St. Botolph Lane and Great Coram Street,’ with twelve illustrations by ‘Phiz,’ London, 1838, 8vo (a copy fetched 11l. in 1895); 3rd edition, revised, with sixteen coloured plates after Henry Alken, 1843, 8vo, and, with three additional papers from the pages of the ‘New Sporting Magazine,’ 1869 and 1890. 3. ‘Handley Cross, or the Spa Hunt: a Sporting Tale. By the author of “Jorrocks’s Jaunts,”’ 3 vols. 1843, London, 12mo. This was expanded into ‘Handley Cross, or Mr. Jorrocks’s Hunt,’ London, 1854, 8vo (first issued in seventeen monthly parts, March 1853–October 1854, in red wrappers designed by Leech; a complete set is valued at 9l.), with seventeen admirable engravings on steel, coloured, and eighty-four woodcuts by John Leech; reprinted with coloured plates by Wildrake, Heath, and Jellicoe ; other editions 1891, 1892, and 1898. 4. ‘Hillingdon Hall, or the Cockney Squire: a Tale of Country Life. By the author of “Handley Cross,”’ 3 vols. 1845, London, 12mo; another edition, London, 1888, 8vo. Jorrocks figures once more in this novel, which first appeared in serial form, and has an ironical dedication to the Royal Agricultural Society. 5. ‘Hawbuck Grange, or the Sporting Adventures of Thomas Scott, Esq. With eight illustrations by Phiz,’ London, 1847, 8vo; other editions, London, 1891, 8vo, and London, 1892, 8vo. These papers appeared originally as by Thomas Scott in ‘Bell’s Life in London.’ 6. ‘Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour; with illustrations by John Leech,’ London, 1853, 8vo (the thirteen original parts fetch about 8l.); 1892, 8vo; and as ‘Soapey Sponge’s Sporting Tour,’ 1893, 8vo. 7. ‘Ask Mamma, or the Richest Commoner in England; with illustrations by John Leech’ (thirteen engravings on steel, coloured, and sixty-nine woodcuts), London, 1858, 8vo (issued in thirteen monthly parts); another edition, London, 1892, 8vo. 8. ‘Plain or Ringle
ts? By the author of “Handley Cross;” with illustrations by John Leech,’ London, 1860, 8vo (the thirteen monthly parts, in red pictorial wrappers after Leech, fetch 5l. to 6l.); another edition 1892, 8vo. The forty-three woodcuts by Leech are exceptionally good, and there are thirteen coloured plates. 9. ‘Mr. Facey Romford’s Hounds; with illustrations by John Leech and Hablot K. Browne,’ London, 1865, 8vo (in twelve parts; the first fourteen coloured plates by Leech, the remaining ten by Browne); the ‘Jorrocks edition,’ illustrated, London, 1892, 8vo.

  The ‘Jorrocks Birthday Book,’ being selections from ‘Handley Cross,’ appeared in 1897, 8vo. Surtees ‘had a positive objection to seeing his name in print,’ and his ‘Horseman’s Manual’ was the only one of his books to which he affixed his name.

  [Gent. Mag. 1864, i. 542, 671; Burke’s Landed Gentry, 1886, ii. 1771; Memorial Sketch prefixed to the Jaunts and Jollities, ed. 1869; Frith’s John Leech, 1891, chs. xv., xvii.; Scott’s Book Sales, 1895, p, 279; Slater’s Early Editions, 1894, p–7; Halkett and Laing’s Dict. of Anonym. and Pseudonym. Lit.; Brit. Mus. Cat.]

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  Series Contents

  Series One

  Anton Chekhov

  Charles Dickens

  D.H. Lawrence

  Dickensiana Volume I

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  George Eliot

  H. G. Wells

  Henry James

  Ivan Turgenev

  Jack London

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  Oscar Wilde

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  Sir Walter Scott

  The Brontës

  Thomas Hardy

  Virginia Woolf

  Wilkie Collins

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Series Two

  Alexander Pushkin

  Alexandre Dumas (English)

  Andrew Lang

  Anthony Trollope

  Bram Stoker

  Christopher Marlowe

  Daniel Defoe

  Edith Wharton

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  G. K. Chesterton

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  Nathaniel Hawthorne

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  Tobias Smollett

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  William Shakespeare

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  Ambrose Bierce

  Ann Radcliffe

  Ben Jonson

  Charles Lever

  Émile Zola

  Ford Madox Ford

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  George Gissing

  George Orwell

  Guy de Maupassant

  H. P. Lovecraft

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  Henry Fielding

  J. M. Barrie

  James Fenimore Cooper

  John Buchan

  John Galsworthy

  Jonathan Swift

  Kate Chopin

  Katherine Mansfield

  L. M. Montgomery

  Laurence Sterne

  Mary Shelley

  Sheridan Le Fanu

  Washington Irving

  Series Four

  Arnold Bennett

  Arthur Machen

  Beatrix Potter

  Bret Harte

  Captain Frederick Marryat

  Charles Kingsley

  Charles Reade

  G. A. Henty

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Edgar Wallace

  E. M. Forster

  E. Nesbit

  George Meredith

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Jerome K. Jerome

  John Ruskin

  Maria Edgeworth

  M. E. Braddon

  Miguel de Cervantes

  M. R. James

  R. M. Ballantyne

  Robert E. Howard

  Samuel Johnson

  Stendhal

  Stephen Crane

  Zane Grey

  Series Five

  Algernon Blackwood

  Anatole France

  Beaumont and Fletcher

  Charles Darwin

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton

  Edward Gibbon

  E. F. Benson

  Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  George Bernard Shaw

  George MacDonald

  Hilaire Belloc

  John Bunyan

  John Webster

  Margaret Oliphant

  Maxim Gorky

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Radclyffe Hall

  Robert W. Chambers

  Samuel Butler

  Samuel Richardson

  Sir Thomas Malory

  Thomas Carlyle

  William Harrison Ainsworth

  William Dean Howells

  William Morris

  Series Six

  Anthony Hope

  Aphra Behn

  Arthur Morrison

  Baroness Emma Orczy

  Captain Mayne Reid

  Charlotte M. Yonge

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  E. W. Hornung

  Ellen Wood

  Frances Burney

  Frank Norris

  Frank R. Stockton

  Hall Caine

  Horace Walpole

  One Thousand and One Nights

  R. Austin Freeman

  Rafael Sabatini

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  Sir Issac Newton

  Stanley J. Weyman

  Thomas De Quincey

  Thomas Middleton

  Voltaire

  William Hazlitt

  William Hope Hodgson

  Series Seven

  Adam Smith

  Benjamin Disraeli

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  David Hume

  E. M. Delafield

  E. Phillips Oppenheim

  Edmund Burke

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  Frances Trollope

  Galileo Galilei

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  Hans Christian Andersen

  Ian Fleming

  Immanuel Kant

  Karl Marx

  Kenneth Grahame

  Lytton Strachey

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Michel de Montaigne

  René Descartes

  Richard Marsh

  Sax Rohmer

  Sir Richard Burton

  Talbot Mundy

  Thomas Babington Macaulay

  W. W. Jacobs

  Series Eight

  Anna Katharine Green

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  The Brothers Grimm

  C. S. Lewis

  Charles and Mary Lamb

  Elizabeth von Arnim

  Ernest B
ramah

  Francis Bacon

  Gilbert and Sullivan

  Grant Allen

  Henryk Sienkiewicz

  Hugh Walpole

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  John Locke

  John Muir

  Joseph Addison

  Lafcadio Hearn

  Lord Dunsany

  Marie Corelli

  Niccolò Machiavelli

  Ouida

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan

  Sigmund Freud

  Theodore Dreiser

  Walter Pater

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Series Nine

  Aldous Huxley

  August Strindberg

  Booth Tarkington

  C. S. Forester

  Erasmus

  Eugene Sue

  Fergus Hume

  George Moore

  Gertrude Stein

  Giovanni Boccaccio

  Izaak Walton

  J. M. Synge

  Johanna Spyri

  John Galt

  Maurice Leblanc

  Max Brand

  Molière

  Norse Sagas

  R. D. Blackmore

  R. S. Surtees

  Sir Thomas More

  Stephen Leacock

  The Harvard Classics

  Thomas Love Peacock

  Thomas Paine

  William James

  Ancient Classics

  Achilles Tatius

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  Cornelius Nepos

  Demosthenes

  Dio Chrysostom

  Diodorus Siculus

  Dionysius of Halicarnassus

  Diogenes Laërtius

  Ennius

  Epictetus