Robert Surtees and Early Victorian Society

A contribution both to Surtees studies and to Victorian social history, this is the first study to put Surtees' opinions and sentiments in an historical rather than a literary context. It uses historical evidence to provide a background for Surtees' novels, and uses his writings to enlarge the purely historical evidence. While the traditional concentration of social historians has been on urban life, industrialization, and social reform, Surtees' more conservative world of the countryside, small provincial towns, and the seedier side of London would have been familiar to the majority of his countrymen.