Surtees Robert Smith and John Leech Illustrator (2 results)
Published by London, Bradbury & Evans, 1853., 1853
- Softcover
- First Edition
Seller: Bernard Quaritch Ltd ABA ILAB, London, United KingdomBernard Quaritch Ltd ABA ILAB
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£ 350.00
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Add to basket8vo, pp. [6], [ix]-x, [2], 408; with 13 hand-coloured steel-engraved plates and numerous woodcut illustrations in text; lightly toned, occasional spots; a good copy in mid 19th-century half red calf with pebble-grained cloth sides, spine gilt in compartments with gilt green morocco lettering-piece in one, gilt venatic centre-pie…ces in others, non-pareil marbled edges and endpapers; rubbed with a few small scuffs, neatly rebacked in red tissue; 19th-century ink ownership inscription of 'Nath. Baker' to p. 25, early 20th-century armorial bookplate of Kington Baker to upper pastedown.First edition of Surtees's most successful novel, and his first collaboration with John Leech. Though never acknowledging his career as a sporting author, Surtees was a significant contributor to the Sporting Magazine, in 1830 replacing Nimrod as hunting correspondent and the following year establishing with Rudolph Ackermann a rival New Sporting Magazine, where he assumed the role of editor in addition to that of hunting correspondent. By the time of his first novels, in the 1840s, he had inherited Hamsterley Hall and was able to devote himself to farming, hunting, and writing. Issued in serial parts, here bound together, Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour had been published in an earlier version in the New Monthly Magazine (1849-1851), under the title Soapey Sponge's Sporting Tour. With Surtees's characteristic engagingly vulgar hero and rollicking style accompanied by Leech's humorously sketched illustrations, the novel proved enormously popular, becoming the first of several collaborations between the two. The present copy is from the library of Kington Baker, a collector whose seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese porcelain is held by the British Museum. Mellon 187.
More imagesPublished by London, Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., 1899-1900., 1899
- Hardcover
- First Edition
Seller: Bernard Quaritch Ltd ABA ILAB, London, United KingdomBernard Quaritch Ltd ABA ILAB
Contact seller5-star sellerCondition: Used
£ 1,200.00
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Add to basketFirst Edition. [Comprising:][SURTEES, Robert Smith,] and John LEECH (illustrator). Handley Cross, or Mr. Jorrocks's Hunt. London, Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., 1899. [with:][SURTEES,] and Hablot Knight BROWNE and W.T. MAUD (illustrators). Hawbuck Grange, or the Sporting Adventures of Thomas Scott, Esquire. London, Bradbury, Agnew, & C…o., 1900. [and:][SURTEES,] and LEECH. Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour. London, Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., 1899. [and:][SURTEES,] and LEECH. 'Ask Mamma', or the richest Commoner in England. London, Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., 1899. [and:][SURTEES,] and LEECH. 'Plain or Ringlets?'. London, Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., 1900. [and:][SURTEES,] and LEECH, BROWNE, and W.T. MAUD (illustrators). Mr. Facey Romford's Hounds. London, Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., 1900. 6 works in 11 vols, royal 8vo, with 87 hand-coloured steel-engraved plates, and 425 woodcut illustrations in text (of which a great many full-page); titles and half-titles printed in red and black, woodcut initials throughout; 2 short marginal tears in Handley Cross vol. II; publisher's red cloth, spines gilt, upper boards lettered directly in gilt, top-edges gilt, tail-edges trimmed, fore-edges uncut; end-caps lightly bumped, corners minimally rubbed, very few marks; a very good set.Limited 'Master of Foxhounds' edition, finely printed at the Whitefriars Press. Having published the first editions of several of Surtees's sporting novels, Bradbury, Agnew, & Co. gathered and reprinted the six most successful as the 'Handley Cross series' as luxury sets. Publisher's advertisements at the rear of the present volumes advertise, besides the 'M.F.H. edition', a 'Country Gentleman's Library edition' and the '"Jorrocks" edition' (each comprising only six volumes), described thus: 'This inimitable series of Volumes is absolutely unique, there being nothing approaching to them in all the wide range of modern or ancient literature. Written by Mr. Surtees, a well-known country gentleman, who was passionately devoted to the healthy sport of fox-hunting, and gifted with a keen spirit of manly humour of a Rabelaisian tinge, they abound with incidents redolent of mirth and jollity. The Artist, Mr. Leech, was himself also an enthusiast in the sport, and has reflected in his illustrations, with instinctive appreciation, the rollicking abandon of the Author's stories.' Surtees's distinctively adventurous style, often coarse and colloquial, has earned admirers and critics for his works in equal measure, yet his sporting novels remain the most popular of the nineteenth century. 'His books ran counter to the currents of his age in their lack of idealism, absence of sentimentality, and almost wilful flouting of conventional moralism. His leading male characters were coarse or shady; his leading ladies dashing and far from virtuous; his outlook on society satiric to the point of cynicism. One Victorian theory was that such readership as he enjoyed was due to the humour of John Leech's illustrations, a view perpetuated in the Dictionary of National Biography. Yet, paradoxically, the qualities that in his own time prevented an appreciation of his talents as a writer, preserved his books in a later age from the oblivion which befell many of his more famous contemporaries. 'Surtees's range was limited, his style often clumsy and colloquial. Even in the better-constructed novels the plots are loose and discursive. Nevertheless, his sharp, authentic descriptions of the hunting field have retained their popularity among fox-hunters, for whom the sanitized (and in their day immeasurably better-selling) hunting novels of George Whyte-Melville have long lost their appeal. Among a wider public his mordant observations on men, women, and manners; his entertaining array of eccentrics, rakes, and rogues, his skill in the construction of lively dialogue (a matter over which he took great pains); his happy genius for unforgettable and quotable phrases; and above all, his supreme comic masterpiece, Jorrocks, have won him success.
