Orson Welles to Bernard Herrmann:
Orson writes to Herrmann, on a copy of ROBERT SMITH SURTEES: Jorrocks's Jaunts & Jollities: A PRESENTATION COPY FROM ORSON WELLES TO BERNARD HERRMANN;
Inscribed "For Benny: much love and merry Christmas from Orson"
Encyclepedia Britannica describes Surtees' JORROCKS, JAUNTS AND JOLLITIES (1831, 1838), as "a collection of tales (and a prototype for Charles Dickens’s "Pickwick Papers")...". Pickwick was one of the film projects Welles considered as a followup to CITIZEN KANE. It was also done as a Mercury radio program.
A younger son, Surtees left for London in 1825, intending to practice law in the capital, but had difficulty making his way and began contributing to the Sporting Magazine. He launched out on his own with the New Sporting Magazine in 1831, contributing the comic papers which appeared as "Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities" in 1838. Jorrocks, the sporting cockney grocer, with his vulgarity and good-natured artfulness, was a great success with the public, and Surtees produced more Jorrocks novels in the same vein. After he inherited his family’s estate the same year, riding to hounds became his passion, and nearly all his writing involved horses and riding.
As a creator of comic personalities, Surtees is still very readable today. Thackeray envied him his powers of observation, while William Morris considered him 'a master of life' and ranked him with Dickens. The novels are engaging and vigorous, and abound with sharp social observation, with a keener eye than Dickens for the natural world. Perhaps Surtees most resembles the Dickens of Pickwick Papers, which was originally intended as mere supporting matter for a series of sporting illustrations to rival Jorrocks. Surtees was fortunate to have as illustrators John Leech and Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”), the illustrator of the Pickwick Papers.
Surtees was a mordant satirist. The snobbery, envy, greed, and ignorance that consume many of his characters are set down without geniality. His portrayal of provincial England just leaving the coaching for the railway era exposes its boredom, ill manners, discomfort, and coarse food, and its matter-of-factness makes admirable social history. Yet the descriptions of fast runs with hounds over open country leave the most lasting impression.
Surtees was not amongst the most popular novelists in the nineteenth century. His work lacked the self-conscious idealism, sentimentality and moralism of the Victorian era; the historian Norman Gash asserted that "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"...However for the very reasons that the Victorians deprecated him, Surtees' work has continued to be read long after some of his more popular contemporaries have been forgotten.
