Although there is some confusion over the date, biographers agree that Robert Smith Surtees was born into a Durham hunting family in 1805, a typical nineteenth century squire’s family dominated by country sports and country duties. After attending Durham Grammar School he was articled to a solicitor in 1822, moved to London and practised law in a desultory way.

By l830, ‘scribbling’ had taken over from the law, and Surtees contributed regularly to the Sporting Magazine. The following year he broke with the magazine, and with publisher R. Ackermann founded the New Sporting Magazine, which he was to edit for the next five years. To this magazine he contributed his comic sketches of Mr Jorrocks, the sporting grocer, collected as Jorrocks Jaunts and Jollities in 1838 with illustrations by Phiz. Jorrocks reappears in the novel Handley Cross (first published in 1843, but best known in an edition illustrated by Leech in 1854), in Surtees’ opinion ‘the finest thing I have ever written’. In Surtees’ lifetime, however, it was overshadowed by Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour (1853), a caustic satire which charts the villainous progress of Mr Soapey Sponge, through English country society.

“The mid-Victorian answer to Arthur Daley, Soapey Sponge specialises in flogging spavined old nags, momentarily reconditioned, to bogus gents and gullible grandees.

Accompanied by his ‘groom’ (another wide-boy) and posing as a man of leisure with ‘a house in Eaton Square, a yacht in Cowes, and a first-rate moor in Scotland, and some said a peerage in expectancy’, Sponge moves from one draughty country house to another, diddling his snobbish, greedy hosts, raising false hopes in the bosoms of mothers anxious to find rich husbands for their frumpish daughters, and taking in some hunting on the side.

He invariably takes his time before moving on to his next victim, while his host – desperate to be shot of him – moves him into a smoky attic room, cuts down on the rations, and serves up marsala instead of sherry.

It’s good to report that Sponge resurfaces in Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds, the last of Surtees’s nine novels: Romford is more than Sponge’s match as a con-man, and when last heard of they are running a bank in Australia. His adventures were published in 1865. His creator had died the year before, in Mutton’s Hotel, Brighton.”

Extract from an article by Jeremy Lewis, Daily Mail, 22nd December, 2000