"At last he was driven to paw over a few score books in a panelled room called the library... He opened and thrust them back, one after another, till crude coloured illustrations of men on horses held his eye. He began at random and read a little, moved into the drawing-room with the volume, and settled down by the fire still reading. It was a foul world into which he peeped for the first time—a heavy-eating, hard-drinking hell of horse-copers, swindlers, matchmaking mothers, economically dependent virgins selling themselves blushingly for cash and lands: Jews, tradesmen, and an ill-considered spawn of Dickens-and-horsedung characters (I give Midmore's own criticism), but he read on, fascinated."
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Original Language: English
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Rudyard Kipling, ‘My Son's Wife’ (1913), A Diversity of Creatures (1917), pp. 346–347
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Smith_Surtees
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Robert Smith Surtees
Robert Smith Surtees (May 17 1805 – March 16 1864) was an English journalist, comic novelist and writer on field sports. His best-known creation, the Cockney huntsman Jorrocks, inspired Dickens's Pickwick Papers.
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