than Dickens for the natural world. Perhaps Surtees most resembles the Dickens of Pickwick Papers, which was originally intended as mere supporting matter for a series of sporting illustrations to rival Jorrocks. Most of Surtees's later novels, were illustrated by John Leech. They included Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour (1853); Ask Mamma (1858); Plain or Ringlets? (1860) and Mr Facey Romford's Hounds (1865). The last of these novels appeared posthumously. In 1841 Surtees married Elizabeth Jane Fenwick, daughter of Addison Fenwick of Bishopwearmouth, by whom he had one son and two daughters. His younger daughter Eleanor married John Vereker, afterwards 5th Viscount Gort. Their son was Field Marshal Lord Gort, commander of the BEF in France in 1940. Influences on others The character "Stalky" (based on Lionel Dunsterville) from Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co. (1899) has Surtees's Handley Cross by heart and quotes from it repeatedly. The novels of Surtees are mentioned several times in Siegfried Sassoon's 1928 autobiographical novel Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Mr. Jorrocks' phrase "my beloved 'earers" often appears in the speech of children in the books of Monica Marsden. Anthony Blanche, as he prepares Charles Ryder for their dinner outing to Thame in Brideshead Revisited, says that they will "imagine ourselves…where? Not on a j-j-jaunt with J-J-Jorrocks anyway. " "There were Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapey Sponge and Mrs. Asquith's Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all spread open." From Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Legacy Surtees was not among the most popular novelists in the nineteenth century. His work lacked the self-conscious idealism, sentimentality and moralism of the Victorian era; the historian Norman Gash asserted that "His leading male characters were coarse or shady; his leading ladies dashing and far from virtuous; his outlook on society satiric to the point of cynicism." Thomas Seccombe, writing in 1898 for the Dictionary of National Biography, said that it was the illustrations of Leech that gave Surtees' work any notability:The coarseness of the text was redeemed in 1854 by the brilliantly humorous illustrations of John Leech, who utilised a sketch of a coachman made in church as his model for the ex-grocer. Some of Leech's best work is to be found among his illustrations to Surtees's later novels, notably Ask Mamma and Mr. Romford's Hounds. Without the original illustrations these works have very small interest. However, for the very reasons that the Victorians deprecated him,