Our Commemorative Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour

£25.00

Our Commemorative Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour

This Limited Edition, produced for the 150th Anniversary of RS Surtees’ death is rather special. It contains the never before seen pencillings and watercolours that John leech used preparatory to the more famous colour plates. To the story…

‘Soapey’ Sponge is a horse-coper, the Victorian equivalent of a plausible and unscrupulous used-car salesman: he specialises in flogging spavined or ill-tempered nags, temporarily reconstituted, to credulous country gentlemen, and moving on to the next county before they realise what they have let themselves in for. He has, we learn, a ‘commanding appearance’, though ‘this was rather marred by a jerky, twitchy, uneasy sort of air, that all too plainly showed that he was not the natural, or what the lower order call the real gentleman.’ He is always immaculately turned out, and since Surtees, like Smollett, is fascinated by what his characters wear, his clothes are described in precise detail (‘His coats were of the single-breasted cut-away order, with pockets outside, and generally either Oxford mixture or some dark colour, that required you to place him in a favourable light to say what it was.’ ) When in London, Mr Sponge puts up at the Bantam Hotel in Bond Street, and spends his days loafing about Rotten Row and Tattersall’s, the bloodstock auctioneers: he is not a cultivated man, and his reading matter is restricted to Mogg’s guide to hackney-cab fares.

As his surname suggests, Mr Sponge is a natural predator, and he comes into his own in the hunting shires of England. Taking with him a reconditioned nag and a seedy Sancho Panza named Mr Leather, he moves from country house to country house, exploiting their owners’ hospitality until their patience runs out or a sale has been made…

We found a recording…