Analysis of R. S. Surtees’s Handley Cross

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 5, 2025

R. S. Surtees creates a satire of the hunting set in his novel Handley Cross. Surtees, an avid hunter, sportsman, and sportswriter, knew his topic well and adds to reader enjoyment by openly making fun of his own passion. He reintroduces readers to Mr. John Jorrocks, a character first made popular in Jorrock’s Jaunts and Jollities.

While some of his contemporaries felt his stories to largely lack an orderly construction, even his critics admitted to enjoying the tales, despite their uncomfortable style. Surtees’s disjointed approach might reflect his background in journalism writing. Even negative critics agree that his accurate reproduction of humorous speech patterns, an essential aspect of his close character observation, makes his novels engaging.

Before Surtees introduces Jorrocks, readers encounter a number of individuals whose names reveal their importance as type characters: the leader of the hunt, Michael Hardey; a “roistering, red-faced, round-about apothecary,” Roger Swizzle; Swizzle’s competitor with “pale and sentimental countenance,” Dr. Sebastian Mello; and a roster of local high-society hunter types that include Alfred Boltem, Simon Hookem, Walter Fleeceall, Judas Turnbill, Michael Grasper, and, most important, Captain Doleful.

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In the opening chapters, Surtees also satirizes health spas through the characters of Swizzle and Mello, giving an account of how they “create” a health business that promotes growth of Handley Cross, allowing it to support a hunt team. Swizzle, an acknowledged swindler, peddles so-called healing properties of his leased spring and specializes in treatment of “languid hypochondriacs.” One treatment involves his carrying a woman who claims she cannot walk to the top of his house and screaming, “Fire!” causing her to come “spinning down stairs in a way that astonished herself.”

Surtees establishes the foolishness of the hunting group that forms in the area by presenting a detailed report of the group’s first meeting and the bylaws it draws up. They include detailed instructions for dress, the evening “or dress uniform” being “a sky-blue coat, lined with pink silk, canary-coloured shorts, and white silk stockings.”

When the longtime huntsman, Michael, dies and the dog “whipper-in,” Peter, abandons the hunting group following a hilariously described initial disastrous jaunt, the Handley Cross club requires a new leader. They solicit Jorrocks, described as a sports grocer, to his great satisfaction. He accepts the position of master of the hunt and establishes himself at Handley Cross with the expectation of royal treatment.

Surtees makes much of Jorrocks’s fondness for marmalade, a habit that apparently qualifies him for high society. Jorrocks’s aristocratic expectations are shared by his silly, egotistical wife, and the couple moves to Handley Cross, accompanied by their lovely niece Belinda. Jorrocks’s lazy Cockney servant, Benjamin, always pronounced “Binjimin” by Jorrocks, becomes whipper-in, and the drunken, yet skillful, James Pigg of Newcastle becomes huntsman.

Following numerous boondoggles involving well-detailed hunts and social activities, Mrs. Jorrocks attempts to arrange a marriage for Belinda with Captain Doleful, although Belinda prefers another of Jorrocks’s recruits, Charlie Stubbs. Adding high-society conflict is the desire of Mrs. Brantinghame that her own daughter, Louisa Letitia Carolina Jemima, referred to simply as “Miss,” capture the affections of Captain Doleful.

Send-ups of high society life, led by the indomitable Barningtons and the interchangeable Romeo Simpkins, Miss Trollope, Miss Mordecai, and Miss Somebodyelse, add humor to the patently ridiculous situation. In one satiric scene, Mrs. Brantinghame, taxed to the limit by bills for entertainment, “gradually lowered the standard.” Rather than serve the traditional expensive fowls and roast game, “she jobbed a joint from Saveloy’s beef and sausage shop in Grudgington Street.”

Miss does become Mrs. Doleful, but soon after declares her husband a “‘orrid man,’” at which point her mother repeats Mr. Jorrocks’s advice. Although Jorrocks had applied the advice to a horse, Mrs. Brantinghame feels it applies also to husbands, toward which a wife should be, “to his faults a little blind, and to his virtues ever kind.”

A large cast of additional characters peppers the novel, including Mr. Prettyfat, Mr. Bowker, Sir Archy, Partridge, Mr. Moonface, Mr. Cowmeadow, Catherine Christian Clementina Constance, and others. Eventually Mrs. Jorrocks moves to have her husband certified as insane, but he delivers one of his well-known speeches and regains his liberty, causing Mrs. Jorrocks to faint dead away upon his return home.

All ends happily with Belinda marrying Charley Stobbs and Jorrocks taking the position of grand protector to Mr. Prettyfat’s poultry. While the novel may be at times too dense for modern readers, the depiction of the pomposity of the upper and sporting classes remains amusing.

In a preface to the 1854 edition, the author cautions, “The reader will have the kindness to bear in mind, that the work merely professes to be a tale, and does not aspire to the dignity of a novel.”

Bibliography

Collison, Robert Lewis. A Jorrocks Handbook; A Centenary Dictionary of the Characters, Places, Situations, and Allusions Which Occur in the Jorrocks Novels and in the Short Stories by Robert Smith Surtees. London: Coole Book Service, 1964.

Welcome, John. The Sporting World of R. S. Surtees. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.