Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour is a delightful comic satire of the fox-hunting fraternity of the mid 19th Century. Surtees takes great pleasure in creating comic personalities and dialogue and resembles the later Pickwick Papers of Dickens, whose style may well have been influenced by Surtees. The story follows the eponymous Soapy Sponge, a Victorian freeloader and confidence trickster, who manages to work his way around the gentrified houses of southern England, fox-hunting as he goes.