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Chapter 10 - Jorrocks’s Canon

Dickens, Surtees, and 1830s Print Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2024

John Gardner
Affiliation:
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
David Stewart
Affiliation:
Northumbria University, Newcastle
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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.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Jorrocks’s Canon
  • Edited by John Gardner, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, David Stewart, Northumbria University, Newcastle
  • Book: Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
  • Online publication: 30 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009268486.011
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  • Jorrocks’s Canon
  • Edited by John Gardner, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, David Stewart, Northumbria University, Newcastle
  • Book: Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
  • Online publication: 30 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009268486.011
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Jorrocks’s Canon
  • Edited by John Gardner, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, David Stewart, Northumbria University, Newcastle
  • Book: Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
  • Online publication: 30 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009268486.011
Available formats
×