By R. S. SURTEES,
Author of “Handley Cross,” “Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour,” etc.
With 15 Coloured Plates after H. Alken. Crown 4 to.
21 s. net.
Robert Smith Surtees, the greatest hunting novelist of all time, whose biography has just been published sixty years after his death, has only recently begun to receive his due from the literary critics. Yet he is the man whose gift Thackeray once said he envied more than that of any man. And no wonder he did—for Surtees is the Dickens of the hunting field, and many of his odd characters are more alive to-day than most of our flesh-and-blood acquaintances. Surtees is a national treasure, for he is one of the most peculiarly English writers of the last century. His pages are crowded with delightfully drawn types, and of them all none is more beloved than the immortal John Jorrocks. It was the success of “Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities,” according to Mr. Thomas Seccombe in the Dictionary of National Biography, which led to the conception of a similar scheme which resulted in “The Pickwick Papers.”
“To be taken before ‘Handley Cross’” is the author’s recommendation in his preface to the second edition of this jolly book, in which are recorded the “eccentric and extravagant” exploits of Surtees’ greatest character. And those people who have not already made the famous grocer-sportsman’s acquaintance will do well to follow it and read of the earlier doings of the M. F. H. of Handley Cross. Those who are already devotees of this delectable story-teller will need no recommendation, beyond the fact that they have here for a reasonable price a handsome reproduction, including Alken’s famous coloured plates, of a work which in its earlier editions costs from fifty to a hundred pounds, according to the state of the copy purchased.
