The Real Thing

One of Rudyard Kipling’s stories, ‘My Son’s Wife’, features a high-minded young aesthete named Midmore, who spends his days pondering the improvement of society. Midmore inherits a country estate from a widowed aunt, Mrs Werf, and reluctantly pays it a visit. Thumbing through the books in the library, he suddenly realizes with horror what the late Colonel Werf ’s mind must have been in its prime: for the colonel, like Kipling, was an enthusiastic reader of Surtees, the mid-Victorian hunting novelist, and Midmore is exposed to an attitude to life – sceptical, brisk, tough-minded and unsentimental – diametrically opposed to his own. ‘It was a foul world into which he peeped for the first time,’ Kipling tells us, ‘a heavy-eating, hard-drinking hell of horse-copers, swindlers, match-making mothers, economically dependent virgins selling themselves blushingly for cash and lands, Jews, tradesmen and an ill-considered spawn of Dickens and horsedung characters.’ Unable to put it down Midmore reels off to bed clutching a copy of Handley Cross, one of Surtees’s milder creations.

Like Tobias Smollett, his only rival as the hard man of the English novel, Surtees has never been highly esteemed by the academic or literary worlds: Orwell, V. S. Pritchett, Joyce Cary, Siegfried Sassoon and Virginia Woolf, amazingly, may have been keen admirers, but given his subject matter and his rumbustious, agreeably coarse-grained prose, his critical neglect is hardly surprising. And although Thackeray said that he would have given all he had to have written Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds, and introduced its author to John Leech, whose gloomy engravings of rain-swept fields and bottle-nosed huntsmen perfectly complement the novels, Surtees was never part of the London literary scene. A North Country squire by background and inclination, he was born in 1805: he worked in London as a lawyer and, more enjoyably, as a sporting journalist, but in 1838 he inherited Hamsterley Hall in Co. Durham on the death of his father, and seldom came south thereafter. A taciturn, reserved figure, he was an old-fashioned Tory squire who combined a cynical view of human nature with private kindliness: he opposed the extension of the franchise but was a conscientious landlord and JP; a passionate huntsman, he loathed the snobbish exclusivity of the more fashionable hunts. Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities, the first of Surtees’s seven novels, was published in the year in which Surtees moved back north: like its successors, it first appeared in serial form. Its hero, Mr Jorrocks, a Cockney grocer and an enthusiastic huntsman, became and remained Surtees’s best-known and most popular creation, but his two best novels are Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, published in book form in 1852, with illustrations by Leech, and its part-sequel, Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds, which began its publication in serial form in 1864, shortly after Surtees’s death in Mutton’s Hotel in Brighton. Both novels are funny, fast-moving and lacking in illusions, populated as they are by characters who have little to recommend them beyond cunning self-interest and an ability to entertain. ‘Can he really be perused?’ Arnold Bennett wondered after Siegfried Sassoon had tried, in vain, to convert his fellow-guests at Garsington to the novels of Surtees. ‘I went straight to a bookseller’s near the Reform Club and ordered Sponge and Romford to be sent to him,’ Sassoon noted in his diary. ‘A few days later I received a postcard. “Many thanks for putting me right on Surtees. Romford is the real thing.”’ Romford is indeed the real thing, but Sponge is even better. ‘Soapey’ Sponge is a horse-coper, the Victorian equivalent of a plausible and unscrupulous used-car salesman: he specializes in flogging spavined or ill-tempered nags, temporarily reconstituted, to credulous country gentlemen, and moving on to the next county before they realize what they have let themselves in for. He has, we  learn, a ‘commanding appearance’, though ‘this was rather marred by a jerky, twitchy, uneasy sort of air, that all too plainly showed that he was not the natural, or what the lower order call the real gentleman’. He is always immaculately turned out and, since Surtees, like Smollett, is fascinated by what his characters wear, his clothes are described in precise detail: ‘His coats were of the single-breasted cut-away order, with pockets outside, and generally either Oxford mixture or some dark colour, that required you to place him in a favourable light to say what it was.’ When in London, Mr Sponge puts up at the Bantam Hotel in Bond Street and spends his days loafing about Rotten Row and Tattersall’s, the bloodstock auctioneers: he is not a cultivated man, and his reading matter is restricted to Mogg’s guide to hackney-cab fares. As his surname suggests, Mr Sponge is a natural predator, and he comes into his own in the hunting shires of England. Taking with him a reconditioned nag and a seedy Sancho Panza named Mr Leather, he moves from country house to country house, exploiting their owners’ hospitality until their patience runs out or a sale has been made. More often than not he travels by train, warning his victim of his imminent arrival at the local railway station: Surtees was well aware of how the railways were changing the countryside, opening up even the remotest parts of Durham and Northumberland to visitors from London and elsewhere. Mr Sponge’s most long-suffering victim is Mr Jawleyford of Jawleyford Court, a fearful old humbug who dyes his whiskers an unconvincing shade of auburn, combines an unctuous public manner with much stamping of the feet behind the scenes, and lives in a huge draughty house with mullioned windows, Tudor chimneys and ancestral portraits peering out through the gloom. Mr Jawleyford has two unmarried daughters, and is momentarily deceived into thinking that Mr Sponge is grander than he is, and might be a suitable husband. Mr Sponge not only ignores his host’s heavy-handed hints that he has overstayed his welcome – vinegary wines are served at dinner, and the fire in his bedroom remains unlit – but, to Mr Jawleyford’s fury, he uses Jawleyford Court as a base from which to visit other prospective clients, and enjoy the pleasures of the hunt. Mr Sponge travels by train, but he inhabits a world more redolent of the Regency that of mid-Victorian England. Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour is peopled with raffish, hard-drinking reprobates like the hiccuping Sir Harry Scattercash of Nonsuch House, who is permanently drunk and gambles away the family fortune with cronies like Captain Seedeybuck, or the cigar-puffing and champagne swigging demi-mondaine Lucy Glitters, late of Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre, a dashing, dissolute figure of the kind more at home in a French rather than an English nineteenth-century novel. But Mr Sponge combines the pleasures of louche society with an appetite for hunting, famously described by Mr Jorrocks as ‘the image of war without its guilt, and only five and twenty per cent of its danger’. Although Surtees is in his element when describing hunting scenes – as was, indeed, his contemporary, Anthony Trollope, an equally enthusiastic foxhunter – Siegfried Sassoon once pointed out that ‘many of his admirers have been people without personal knowledge of the sport’: those of us whose knowledge of hunting is restricted to the place mats of old-fashioned country hotels can relish them for the excitement of the chase, and the vivid evocation of raw winter mornings, ploughed fields, leafless copses and angry stentorian voices, like those of the bespectacled Lord Scamperdale, bellowing ‘Hold hard, gen’lemen’ as some impetuous buffoon overrides the hounds. But Surtees should be enjoyed, above all, for the comedy of the English social scene, for his rich panoply of bores and drunks and social climbers and ambitious mamas and tweed-clad confidence tricksters. The horses and the huntsmen can be enjoyed or discarded according to taste. The only man to get the better of Sponge is Facey Romford, the villainous anti-hero of Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds. Thick-skinned as he is, Sponge can no longer stay with another of his victims, the asthmatic Mr Jogglebury Crowdey, who has taken to bawling instructions about his imminent departure outside his bedroom window: Romford invites him to come shooting at Queercove Hall, and Sponge finds himself in bug-ridden digs above a saddler’s shop, where the brutish Romford feeds him on pork, strong cheese and gin, robs him at cards, and deafens him with atrocious playing on the flute. Sponge marries Lucy Glitters at the end of the novel that bears his name, and together they set up The Sponge Cigar and Betting Rooms in Jermyn Street: he makes a fleeting, furtive appearance in Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds, dodging out of the back door when Romford calls to collect a debt before bolting to Australia ‘with all the spoons and the loose cash’, leaving Lucy to fend for herself. Those characters in Mr Sponge who aren’t rogues or wastrels tend to be half-witted, like poor Mr Foozle – ‘the hope of the house of Foozle’ – whose sole contribution to conversation is to repeat verbatim what has come before (‘“Well. Robert, have you been to Dulverton to-day?” Answer, “No, I’ve not been to Dulverton to-day.” Question, “Are you going to Dulverton to-morrow?” Answer, “No, I’m not going to Dulverton to-morrow,”’ and so on). Surtees’s dyspeptic view of human nature is disconcerting on first acquaintance, but it is tempered by humour, an eye for the small, revealing detail and a no-nonsense approach to telling a story. Or, as Joyce Cary put it in his introduction to the old World’s Classics edition of Mr Sponge, ‘To read him is to escape for an hour or two from eyewash and cant into an atmosphere as brisk as one of his hunting mornings, sharp and raw, highly unflattering to everything in sight, faces, hedges, trees, nibbled pasture and greasy plough, but thoroughly bracing.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 31 © Jeremy Lewis 2011