Surr wrote several novels, including
Consequences (1796),
The Magic of Wealth (1815), and
Richmond, or, Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street Officer (1827), some of which were translated into French or German.
George Barnwell Surr's three-volume novel ''George Barnwell; or, The Merchant's Clerk'' (1798) is an adaption of George Lillo's play
The London Merchant (1731), itself based on a seventeenth century
broadside ballad. It was inspired by
Sarah Siddons, who played Millwood in a 1796 production of the play at
Drury Lane. In the novel, Barnwell is torn between his parents' desire for him to enter the world of work, and intellectual interests shared with his atheist and republican friend Mr Mental, a radical philosopher. The critique of Mr Mental's modern philosophy is one expression of Surr's conservative point of view, which is shown throughout his works.
A Winter in London Surr's most famous novel was
A Winter in London, or Sketches of Fashion, a bestseller which went into thirteen editions. The plot is a mixture of romance, fashionable novel, and
Gothic. A baby, Edward, survives a shipwreck and is adopted by the Dickens family. His childhood is shown in the first volume; in the second, he enters London society, guided by a doctor who provides information and satirical commentary. There is a subplot about usurpation, involving Edward's true father; in the end, Edward is restored to his inheritance and marries one of the Dickens daughters. Its popularity owed a great deal to its depictions of upper-class wealthy life. In particular, one of the characters, the confused and continually-defrauded Duchess of Belgrave, is a parody of
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
A Winter in London is an example of the fashionable novel, intermediate between
Frances Burney's
Evelina and "silver fork" novels of the 1820s and 1830s. In the wake of its success, a subgenre called the "season novel" appeared and was popular for a few years. These imitators, like
A Winter in London, had titles including a brief period of time and the name of a fashionable location; many also include satirical depictions of upper-class life. Later season novels, beginning with the anonymous
A Winter in Bath, are often patterned around infidelity or divorce, include a scene at a ball where the protagonist is lectured on notable society figures, and
feature real people, sometimes under their real names. Titled
A Refutation of Certain Misrepresentations Relative to the Nature and Influence of Bank Notes and of the Stoppage of Specie at the Bank of England upon the Price of Provisions (1801), it has been called a foreshadowing of banking theory for its statement that the Bank could not issue notes which had lost their value. ==Bibliography==