SURTEES, ROBERT SMITH (1803-1864), English novel ist and sporting writer, was the second son of Anthony Surtees of Hamsterley Hall, Durham. Educated to be a solicitor, Surtees soon began to contribute to the Sporting Magazine, and in 1831 he published a treatise on the law relating to horses and par ticularly the law of warranty, entitled The Horseman's Manual. In the following year he helped to found the New Sporting Magazine, of which he was the editor for the next five years. To this periodical he contributed between 1832 and 1834 the papers which were afterwards collected and published in 1838 as Jorrocks's Jaunts and Jollities. This humorous narrative of the sporting ex periences of a cockney grocer, which suggested the more famous Pickwick Papers of Charles Dickens, is the work by which Surtees is chiefly remembered, though his novel Handley Cross, pub lished in 1843, in which the character of "Jorrocks" is reintro duced as a master of fox-hounds, also enjoyed a wide popularity.
The former of these two books was illustrated by "Phiz" (H. K. Browne), and the latter, as well as most of Surtees's subsequent novels, by John Leech, whose pictures of "Jorrocks" are every where familiar and were the chief means of ensuring the lasting popularity of that humorous creation. Surtees wrote other novels, the last of which, Mr. Facey Romford's Hounds (1865), appeared after the author's death (March 16, 1864).
See R. S. Surtees, Jorrocks's Jaunts and Jollities (London, 1869), containing a biographical memoir of the author ; W. P. Frith, John Leech, His Life and Work (2 vols., London, 1891) ; Samuel Halkett and J. Laing, Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1882-1888).