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.