A world of snobs and swindlers

Orwell thought that Mark Twain’s  picture of life on the Mississippi showed ‘how human beings behave when they are not frightened of the sack’ and so are free to develop their personalities Something similar might be said of the rural England portrayed by R. S. Surtees, even if in his novels household servants, grooms and huntsmen may be in danger of being ‘turned off without a character’. Nevertheless Orwell’s observation that in Twain’s Mississippi stories ‘the State hardly existed’ while ‘the churches were weak and spoke with many voices’ might be applied to Surtees’s England too.

Reading Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour again, one is struck by the complete absence of officialdom. There is poverty there. The peasants — and they are really peasants whom Surtees calls ‘chawbacons’ — are a miserable lot. And yet this is an England where people are free as we are not today. They lead unsupervised lives.