Chapter 10 - Jorrocks’s Canon

Summary

This chapter makes an argument that two of the most successful Victorian novelists, Charles Dickens and R. S. Surtees, those new men of the 1830s (Surtees was twenty-five when he begins Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities; Dickens twenty-four at the conception of the Pickwick Papers), were both marked deeply by what came before in the late Georgian period’s popular-cultural print culture, notably its sporting comicalities. Though they took that tradition in very different paths – Surtees stayed in the sporting groove throughout his career, while Dickens very soon abandoned it – both were fashioned by it, and both initially positioned themselves within it. Both joined the key post-Napoleonic tradition of picaresque evident in the work of ‘Cockney’ humourists, in the fiction of Pierce Egan, and, indeed, in the poetry of Lord Byron. The chapter reads both men’s early writing against the wider context of late-Georgian print culture, addressing their relationship to the Romantic-era popular-cultural literary forms that inform their early work. The chapter brings to light this vibrant culture, focussing on Dickens and Surtees but also addressing such figures as Pierce Egan, Robert Seymour, and Thomas Hood.