Surtees & money.

Money and literature have an awkward relationship. Most authors are very human and like to be well paid. Yet authors also have a tendency to distinguish between literature as an art form and writing as a way of making a living, and they put literature on a higher plane of existence than the vulgar and repetitive accumulation of wealth. Despite the undoubted genuineness of their private efforts to improve their own fees and royalties, many authors in public deprecate the materialism of modern society. In October 2000, the Institute of Economic Affairs, a London-based think tank, published a book on The Representation of Business in English Literature. In a foreword, the institute's director, John Blundell, asked, "Why does the novelist, the writer of fiction, spit at the market, despise its institutions such as private property and the rule of law, and try to bite off the hand that feeds him?" The book provoked some irritation in such publications as The New Statesman and Prospect.

But an argument could be made that the use of literature to attack market institutions was a twentieth-century mistake. There may be intellectual mopping-up still to do, but few now question the superiority of liberal democracy and the market economy to the totalitarian, planned, and state-owned alternatives. In this respect the twenty-first century is more like the nineteenth century than its immediate predecessor. Some literature of the nineteenth century may therefore seem closer to us than much that was written in the twentieth century. In trying to find a drama to comment on the bubble economy of 1999 and 2000, the British Broadcasting Corporation chose Trollope's The Way We Live Now in preference to anything written in the previous hundred years. Trollope's novel had originally been a response to the speculative excesses of the early 1870s, years when a burst of American railroad construction stimulated a boom in the trans-Atlantic economy of the day.

Robert Surtees (1) has much in common with two better-known Victorian novelists, Dickens and Trollope, and he may have had some influence on Dickens. (Surtees was born in 1805, Dickens in 1812. Surtees's Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities--a series of comical episodes loosely linked by a tour of parts of England--is said to have suggested the original plan of Pickwick Papers.) All three novelists lived in an individualistic society with low taxes and small government, akin to the self-image (although not entirely the reality) of modern America. They were not embarrassed by money, either their own or other people's. Surtees and Trollope accepted the inequality of mid-Victorian England as part of the human condition, and in Surtees's case he saw the inequality as the by-product of a game, the always entertaining moves and countermoves of the market economy. If people want to return to equilibrium after the stock market nonsense of the late 1990s and its crazy redistributions, Surtees's comments on the mid-Victorian economy will seem contemporary, as well as refreshingly funny and agreeably unsentimental. Surtees deserves to be remembered as England's anticipation of Mark Twain.

Literary criticism is often rather snooty about Surtees. In the third edition of Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia, his books are dismissed as "of minor literary value," although they are acknowledged as preserving "the spirit of the old English sporting life." Volume six of the Pelican Guide to English Literature, which covers the period from Dickens to Hardy, mentions him three times, but places his work in "the mounds of the talented, readable, amusing or historically interesting" novels, not with "the handful of `great' novels." In many surveys of Victorian literature he is not noticed at all. But it is undeniable that, in one respect, Surtees's achievement matched that of the acknowledged leaders of Victorian fiction. Like them, he imagined a world--or, at any rate, he imagined an England--which was inhabited by people who are recognizably his characters and could not be the characters of any other novelist. So there is a Surteesian "England," just as there is a Barsetshire and a Dickensian "England."

Surtees's England contained a large number of markets. There were markets in horses, markets in financial instruments, markets in stocks and shares, markets in houses, even markets in matrimony. It was in and through these markets that his characters not only bought and sold, but also lived and died, triumphed and failed, and cheated or were cheated. Indeed, the hallmark of Surtees's England was that cheating was routine in transactions of all kinds. Surtees is usually seen as the definitive ...