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Available
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Publication
Oxford University Press, USA (1982), Paperback, 526 pages
Description
The humorous narrative of the sporting experiences of a cockney grocer
User reviews
LibraryThing member thorold
I've never made a particular effort to read Surtees - although I'm fairly interested in the mid-Victorian period, I'm not a horsey, doggy sort of person, and have only the mildest interest in rural "sports". However, a couple of people recently recommended me to try him, and thanks to Project
Mr. Sponge's sporting tour is a picaresque novel chronicling the efforts of a shady character called "Soapy" Sponge to make his fortune while living off simple-minded fox-hunting folk. He gets a bunch of unreliable horses on sale or return from a dodgy secondhand horse dealer, and travels around getting a selection of increasingly appalling hosts to accommodate him and the horses for nothing. From time to time he manages to do a horse deal, and every two or three chapters there's a description of a fox-hunt. The mood and style are rather reminiscent of Thackeray (indeed, Surtees makes frequent allusions to WMT), with a wide range of rackety country gentry and dubious "sporting gentlemen" and "trumpets". The big difference, though, is that Thackeray allows some of his characters to have good qualities, even if generosity and altruism are usually cancelled out by folly or naïveté. In Surtees, everyone is out for what he or she can get: greed and sensuality are the only motivations for action. Characters differ largely in the particular degree of cunning or foolishness they display.
The satire is enjoyable, although at this distance in time it sometimes comes across as rather heavy-handed. What's also fascinating is the way the book observes a particular moment in the development of English society, when the Georgian pattern of social relations was starting to be upset by the new possibilities of inexpensive travel provided by the railways. Landowners are still inclined to believe that anyone who turns up on their doorstep with a string of horses and a plausible story must be a man of substance: as Mr Sponge demonstrates time after time, this was no longer a safe assumption. Twenty years later, Sponge would never have got away with it, as the definition of "gentleman" became much narrower, but around 1850 there were still plenty of "real" gentlemen who had never been to school, spoke local dialect, and scorned to pay tradesmen's bills.
Surtees is famous for his descriptions of hunting, of course. They are clearly well done - he manages to convey something of the excitement of riding across country at breakneck speed even to a non-rider - but it still seems to be a somewhat idiotic occupation, even as he describes it.
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Gutenberg it's free to read once you've got an ebook reader...Mr. Sponge's sporting tour is a picaresque novel chronicling the efforts of a shady character called "Soapy" Sponge to make his fortune while living off simple-minded fox-hunting folk. He gets a bunch of unreliable horses on sale or return from a dodgy secondhand horse dealer, and travels around getting a selection of increasingly appalling hosts to accommodate him and the horses for nothing. From time to time he manages to do a horse deal, and every two or three chapters there's a description of a fox-hunt. The mood and style are rather reminiscent of Thackeray (indeed, Surtees makes frequent allusions to WMT), with a wide range of rackety country gentry and dubious "sporting gentlemen" and "trumpets". The big difference, though, is that Thackeray allows some of his characters to have good qualities, even if generosity and altruism are usually cancelled out by folly or naïveté. In Surtees, everyone is out for what he or she can get: greed and sensuality are the only motivations for action. Characters differ largely in the particular degree of cunning or foolishness they display.
The satire is enjoyable, although at this distance in time it sometimes comes across as rather heavy-handed. What's also fascinating is the way the book observes a particular moment in the development of English society, when the Georgian pattern of social relations was starting to be upset by the new possibilities of inexpensive travel provided by the railways. Landowners are still inclined to believe that anyone who turns up on their doorstep with a string of horses and a plausible story must be a man of substance: as Mr Sponge demonstrates time after time, this was no longer a safe assumption. Twenty years later, Sponge would never have got away with it, as the definition of "gentleman" became much narrower, but around 1850 there were still plenty of "real" gentlemen who had never been to school, spoke local dialect, and scorned to pay tradesmen's bills.
Surtees is famous for his descriptions of hunting, of course. They are clearly well done - he manages to convey something of the excitement of riding across country at breakneck speed even to a non-rider - but it still seems to be a somewhat idiotic occupation, even as he describes it.
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Subjects
Language
Original publication date
1853
ISBN
0192815210 / 9780192815217