[SURTEES, Robert Smith,] and John LEECH (illustrator).
Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour.
London, Bradbury & Evans, 1853.
8vo, pp. [6], [ix]-x, [2], 408; with 13 hand-coloured steel-engraved plates and numerous woodcut illustrations in text; lightly toned, occasional spots; a good copy in mid 19th-century half red calf with pebble-grained cloth sides, spine gilt in compartments with gilt green morocco lettering-piece in one, gilt venatic centre-pieces in others, non-pareil marbled edges and endpapers; rubbed with a few small scuffs, neatly rebacked in red tissue; 19th-century ink ownership inscription of ‘Nath. Baker’ to p. 25, early 20th-century armorial bookplate of Kington Baker to upper pastedown.
First edition of Surtees’s most successful novel, and his first collaboration with John Leech. Though never acknowledging his career as a sporting author, Surtees was a significant contributor to the Sporting Magazine, in 1830 replacing Nimrod as hunting correspondent and the following year establishing with Rudolph Ackermann a rival New Sporting Magazine, where he assumed the role of editor in addition to that of hunting correspondent. By the time of his first novels, in the 1840s, he had inherited Hamsterley Hall and was able to devote himself to farming, hunting, and writing.
Issued in serial parts, here bound together, Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour had been published in an earlier version in the New Monthly Magazine (1849-1851), under the title Soapey Sponge’s Sporting Tour. With Surtees’s characteristic engagingly vulgar hero and rollicking style accompanied by Leech’s humorously sketched illustrations, the novel proved enormously popular, becoming the first of several collaborations between the two.
The present copy is from the library of Kington Baker, a collector whose seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese porcelain is held by the British Museum.
Mellon 187.
