Robert Smith Surtees became the most popular of the “squire novelists” with his series featuring the inexpert fox-hunting enthusiast and London grocer John Jorrocks. Made famous first in Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities and later in its sequel, Handley Cross (1843), Jorrocks made his final appearance in Hillingdon Hall (1845), published first as a series, which focuses on his life after retirement.
Totally inept, Jorrocks indulges in experimentation with scientific applications in this novel, which strengthens the humor in Jorrocks’s trademark struggles to succeed in an unfair world. Once committed to an asylum, certified insane by his social-climbing wife, but then released due to the confusion of the legal system, Jorrocks represents the ultimate survivor—a user of systems who pays little attention to law when dealing in horse trading and other methods of commerce. Surtees’s use of the horse-trading theme throughout the Jorrocks series supports his cynical tone toward human dealings with one another in what amounts to a type of social barter system. That the undeserving Jorrocks consistently profits by corrupt activities should not be funny, but it is, due to what Tim Congdon terms the “audacity of the fraud.” Readers end up admiring in Jorrocks what they would attack in a real person who dealt with them as Jorrocks does with his fellow humans.
In Hillingdon Hall, Jorrocks moves from master of the hunt into politics, absurdly becoming a justice of the peace. Readers of the previous novel will recall James Pigg, Jorrocks’s former huntsman, who is delighted to return to Jorrocks’s household, where he consistently counters Jorrocks’s schemes. The normal Jorrocks hijinks occur, leading not to disaster, but rather to the promise of election to Parliament. The novel proves autobiographical for Surtees, a politician who features the push for Corn Laws in the novel, criticizing the Anti–Corn Law League. As a prosperous landowner and investor, Surtees’s satirizing the Corn Laws remains understandable, but in doing so, he also masterfully satirizes Parliament. Jorrocks must campaign against one Marquis of Bray, who represents the dukes of Donkeytown in a pitting of the faux gentleman farmer against the aristocracy.
Some feel Surtees overextended the satire, attacking the belief in an industrial age that country living was somehow more pure than that of the city. This occurs when Jorrocks’s own estate manager, Joshua Sneakington, defrauds him. Jorrocks understands then that the country harbors “as big thieves” as London.
Surtees also emphasizes the need for protection of land rights, although he remains skeptical about the lawyers appointed to do so. However, he softens in his approach to his culture by including a marriage between a landowner and a commoner, emphasizing that barter can successfully occur in the abstract as well as in the material. During an era marked by the ideology of laissez-faire, Surtees produces self-reliant characters always alert to the possibility of fraud, unafraid to perpetrate it themselves in what generally amounts to an innocent manner. Such soft fraud proves equivalent to the ubiquitous white lie, perceived by readers who practice that usage themselves as necessary for character survival in the Jorrocks tales.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Congdon, Tim. “Surtees and Money.” The New Criterion. Available online. URL: http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/jun02/surtees.htm. Downloaded on May 12, 2025.