'tinting is all that's worth living for
Raymond Carr
Te contempt in which the literary establishment holds the works of Robert Smith Surtees is only equalled by the con- tempt in which his readers, like myself, hold the literary establishment. Since a colleague could accuse a fox-hunting head of an Oxford college of 'discrediting the University by his degrading antics', it is to be expected that some dons sustain the prejudices of 19th-century radicals and low churchmen, scorning a writer whose novels, admired by Thackeray and Kipling, are concerned with fox hunting and the state of English agriculture. Surtees is not regarded as a suitable subject for English Literature or much consulted by historians as an incomparable source for the study of mid- Victorian rural society. It is astonishing that none of Surtees' works was in print in 1979. It is the achievement of the Surtecs Society, founded by Sir Charles Pickthorn in that year, to have brought out his most important novels with those original illus- trations that have etched his characters on the mind's eye for many of us since child- hood. The Society now publishes Frederick Watson's study of Surtees. It is a useful but not i great hook, illustrating Surtees' char- acter with lengthy quotations from his works. It was written in 1933 before farm- ing became a mechanised agro business and the traditional rural community was still a social unit, as A.J.P. Taylor put it, 'complete with squires, fox hunting and gnarled yokels'. Watson writes of 'yellow stooks upon the stubble under a still autumn light'. Not many stooks about
the place now.
Surtees himself was no rural romantic. A satirist, he recognised the limitations of satire: as Watson remarks, 'he could only write with genius about ignoble people'. But what magnificent characters they are, their utterances now part of the folk memory of the sporting world. Jorrocks, the cockney grocer MFH, not above tout- ing his tea at meets; Facey Romford, a mercenary itinerant Master of questionable morals living off his subscribers; a whole gallery of professional huntsmen from the flashy Bragg on the look out for a rich and inexperienced Master to exploit, to Jorrocks' huntsman, the immortal James Pigg. All are redeemed by their enthusiasm or skill as fox hunters. Jorrocks is a pusil- lanimous rider. 'Come hup, I say, you ugly beast', he roars, pretending to put his horse at a stiff fence, 'hut in reality holding him hard by the head'. But he lives for hunting. Pigg is a foul-mouthed tipple, but for him 'there's nout like huntin'. Facey Romford is a rogue, but he kills his foxes; when his hounds check, the intuition of genius tells him where his fox has run. Surtees' greatest literary creation is Soapy Sponge, the anti- hero of his best novel. Sponge, Surtees himself wrote, is 'a characterless character', whose only reading is Mogg's Cab Fares of London and whose only occupation is fox hunting. Yet he is as memorable as Mr Micawber. It is not only the capacity to cre- ate unforgettable characters that invites comparison with Dickens: at its best, Sur- tees' comic dialogue is as good as anything in Dickens; at its worst, it must be con- fessed, it is terrible.
Watson sets Surtees in his context. Born in 1805, he died in 1865. He therefore wit- nessed the great sea change in fox hunting. From the occupation of provincial nota- bles, farmers and tradesmen it became a national sport centred on the crack Mid- land packs. The chronicler of this fashion- able world was Nimrod — the pen name of the inventor of hunting journalism, Charles James Apperley. Apperley was a snob, impressed by the long corridors and liver- ied servants in the mansions of the great
hunting magnates and much given to Latin quotations. (It is a sign of the cultural decadence of our times that there is not much Latin in sporting journalism today). Surtees disliked Nimrod — there is a cruel parody of his inflated style in Handley Cross — and everything he stood for. Sur- tees disliked fashionable hunting and the hard riding for riding's sake and the loose living that went with it. His heart was in the provinces whence he came. He never hunt- ed, Watson observes, with crack hunts and his own experiences as a master in his native Durham were unrewarding once his hounds took to worrying sheep. The great aristocrats kept magnificent hunting estab- lishments: but Lord Ladythorne is more interested in flirting with attractive girls than in killing foxes. The Duke of Tergiver- sation adjusts his hospitality on 'the debtor and creditor principle' to his political and social ambitions. Lord Scamperdale lives on bacon in one room but flatters farmers' wives as all good masters should. No one saw more clearly than Surtees that should farmers, exasperated by inconsiderate fox hunters, turn against hunting, the sport was doomed: from being a bond of union it would foster a rural class war.
But there is no streak of sentimentality in Surtees' scenes from provincial life, little compassion. Hence the failure of his novels to appeal to the Victorian public. As Wat- son points out, there is no mention of the sufferings of the agricultural labourers who appear as clots who misdirect hunts. He was an enthusiast for improved farming; his obsession with proper drainage appears time and time again in his novels and in a curious passage Jorrocks dreams of a steam-driven combine harvester. Surtees was, as Watson rightly argues, a progressive and a prophet. The small farmers who lack capital for improvements, like weasels, must go to the wall. Men must adjust to the times. At first he believed railways would drag squires to London and a race of absentee landlords would unleash a French Revolution; but he came to see railways as a civilising influence. Rather than destroy- ing a harmonious rural society, railways might save it by 'bringing wealth and salubrity' to an isolated countryside. His Hints to Railway Travellers and County Visi- tors to London (1852) told the squires how
to buy tickets and find the cheapest floors in hotels. Detail always delighted him and he bores his readers with paragraph-long description of clothing, down to the last button. He is a provincial puritan: he detests gambling, low' sports like cock- fighting and bear-baiting, scratch hunts organised by publicans. He disapproved of coursing as artificial and deplored the fact that shooting, once the healthy exercise of a man and his dog to replenish the pot, was on the way to becoming an organised massacre, exterminating 'in one day what should serve you a year'. Jorrocks is all very well in his way in fiction, but in real life 'the fact is that a man won't do for a Master of Hounds unless he is a gentle- man'.
He embodied in his writings all the prej- udices of his caste. He hated social climbers in the hunting field and outsiders from 'trade' who bought estates to acquire gentility. Sir Moses Mainchance was one; Mr Jawleyford another. 'Paper-booted, pen-and-ink landowners', they screw their tenants, fail in their obligations to the countryside and come a cropper financially. His deplorable anti-Semitism stemmed from his belief that Jews were behind the racecourse gambling world he so hated. In Ask Mama, the Miss Jewsons turn up their 'oily hook noses at everything'; 'cigar- smoking Israelites' loll about in their carriages at races 'like half-drunk sailors on a spree'.
Why did this north country landowner take to writing at all? He may, in his youth, have needed the money, but not after he inherited Hamsteley; his early journalism may have relieved the tedium of studying for the bar in London. He certainly reject- ed fame as a spur since he wrote anonymously. He knew he was no good at plots and his novels arc a succession of episodes. I think writing was, for him, a means of pitching into those aspects of landed society and the world of fox hunting of which he deeply disapproved: the rise of the nouveaux riches, the use of the hunting field as a marriage market where ambitious mothers and their daughters pursue a promising husband as the field pursue a fox. Jorrocks was meant to shock the fash- ionable world of Leicestershire, so buttered up by Nimrod, who must have found it inconceivable that a retail grocer should become an MFH.
In much of his writing Surtees is tilting at windmills that have long been dismantled, castigating pretensions that now assume other forms in a world where social advancement is achieved by dining pop stars rather than MFHs. Surtees has been neglected because his major novels centre on fox hunting; he may survive outside that world, now threatened with legislative destruction at the hands of townee MPs, through the sheer vitality that this reserved country landowner injected into his best work — and some of his work is quite terri- bly dull. For the opportunity to taste it at its best we have to thank Sir Charles Pick- thorn and the Surtees Society. With luck, the collected works of Surtees may one day shine from the shelves of English Litera- ture Libraries. Frederick Watson's quota- tions demonstrate that at least they are more amusing than much of the stuff that nestles there.
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