Charles Reade - Works

Novelist and playwright, born in Ipsden House, Oxfordshire, SC England, UK. He studied at Oxford, and was called to the bar in 1843, but never practised. He first tried to write for the stage in 1850, producing about 13 dramas. His life after 1852 is a succession of plays by which he lost money, and novels that won profit and fame. These novels illustrate social injustice and cruelty in one form or another, and his writing is realistic and vivid. They include Peg Woffington (1852), Hard Cash (1863), and A Woman-hater (1877). His masterpiece was his long historical novel of the 15th-c, The Cloister and the Hearth (1861).

Charles Reade (June 8, 1814 - April 11, 1884) was an English novelist and dramatist, best known for The Cloister and the Hearth.

Reade, the son of an Oxfordshire squire, was born at Ipsden, Oxfordshire. His first comedy, The Ladies' Battle, appeared at the Olympic Theatre in May 1851. It was followed by Angela (1851), A Village Tale (1852), The Lost Husband (1852), and Gold (1853). But Reade's reputation was made by the two-act comedy, Masks and Faces, in which he collaborated with Tom Taylor. In 1854 he produced, in conjunction with Tom Taylor, Two Loves and a Life, and The King's Rival, and, unaided, The Courier of Lyons--well known under its later title, The Lyons Mail--and Peregrine Pickle.

He made his name as a novelist in 1856, when he produced It's Never Too Late to Mend, a novel written with the purpose of reforming abuses in prison discipline and the treatment of criminals. The truth of some details was challenged, and Reade defended himself vigorously. Five minor novels followed in quick succession,--The Course of True Love never did run Smooth (1857), Jack of all Trades (1858), The Autobiography of a Thief (1858), Love Me Little, Love Me Long (1859), and White Lies (1860), dramatized as The Double Marriage. Then appeared, in 1861, his masterpiece, The Cloister and the Hearth, relating the adventures of the father of Erasmus. and it became recognised as one of the finest historical novels in existence. Returning from the 15th century to modern English life, he next produced another startling novel with a purpose, Hard Cash (1863), in which he drew attention to the abuses of private lunatic asylums. Three more such novels, followed --Foul Play (1869), in which he exposed the iniquities of ship-knackers, and paved the way for the labours of Samuel Plimsoll; The Wandering Heir (1875), of which he also wrote a version for the stage, was suggested by the Tichborne Case.

Reade also produced three elaborate studies of character: Griffith Gaunt (1866), A Terrible Temptation (1871), A Simpleton (1873). The first of these was in his own opinion his best novel. but he produced another version alone in 1877, under the title of A Scuttled Ship, and the failure was pronounced. Reade's health failed from that time. On his death, he left behind him a completed novel, A Perilous Secret, which showed he was still skilled the arts of weaving a complicated plot and devising thrilling situations. Reade was an amateur of the violin, and among his works is an essay on Cremona violins with the title, A Lost Art Revived.

It was characteristic of Reade's open and combative nature that he admitted the public freely to the secrets of his method of composition. He had planned a great work on "the wisdom and folly of nations," dealing with social, political and domestic details, and it was chiefly for this that his collection was destined, but in passing he found the materials useful as a store of incidents and suggestions. A collector of the kind was bound to be systematic, otherwise his collection would have fallen into confusion, and Reade's collection contains many curiosities in classification and tabulation.

On the value of this method for his art there has been much discussion, the prevalent opinion being that his imagination was overwhelmed and stifled by it. However, he did not merely shovel the contents of his notebooks into his novels; they served as an atmosphere of reality in which he worked, so that his novels were like pictures painted in the open air. Even in his novels of character the development of character is shown through a rapid unceasing progression of significant facts; it was probably in writing for the stage that he learned the value of keeping the attention of his readers incessantly on the alert.

See Charles L. Reade and Compton Reade, Charles Reade, a Memoir (2 vols., 1887); AC Swinburne, Miscellanies (1886) and some recollections by John Coleman, Charles Reade as I knew him (1903).

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

Works

Books by Charles Reade include:

Masks and Faces (1852) Peg Woffington (1853) Christie Johnstone (1853) It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856) Autobiography of a Thief (1858) Jack of All Trades (1858) Love Me Little, Love Me Long (1859) The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) Hard Cash (1863) Griffith Gaunt (1866) Foul Play (1869) Put Yourself in His Place (1870) A Terrible Temptation (1871) The Wandering Heir (1873) A Woman Hater (1877) A Perilous Secret (1884)