"On the one hand, Surtees was a man of the eighteenth century—hence Thackeray's understanding of him; on the other, he was an amateur who dealt almost entirely with background figures, the great Jorrocks excepted. He was deeply knowing about English sporting life, the squirearchy and the law, but he did not construct the melodramas and elaborate plots of the other Victorian novelists, nor did he issue their moralisings. He often excelled them in the recording of ordinary speech and day-to-day incident. He is fresher than the masters, but he is artless. A good deal of his humour is the humour of shrewd sayings which, later on, we find in Kipling. His original contribution is in the field of invective. Surtees has a truly Elizabethan power of denunciation."
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V. S. Pritchett, ‘The Brutal Chivalry’, The Working Novelist (1965), p. 94
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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