Born, at Ipsden, Oxfordshire, 8 June 1814. Privately educated, 1822–27; at school at Staines, 1827–29. At home 1829–31. Matric., Magdalen Coll., Oxford, 26 July 1831; Demy, 1831–35; B.A., 18 June 1835; Vinerian Scholar, 1835; Fellow of Magdalen Coll., July 1835; M.A., 1838; Vinerian Fellow, 1842; D.C.L., 1 July 1847; Vice-Pres., Magdalen Coll., 1851. Student of Lincoln’s Inn, Nov. 1836; called to Bar, 16 Jan. 1843; Friendship with Mrs. Seymour begun, 1852. Play “The Ladies’ Battle” (adapted from Scribe and Legouvé), produced at Olympic Theatre, 7 May 1851; “Angelo,” Olympic, 11 Aug. 1851; “A Village Tale,” Strand, 12 April, 1852; “The Lost Husband,” Strand, 26 April 1852; “Masks and Faces,” Haymarket, 20 Nov. 1852; “Gold,” Drury Lane, 10 Jan. 1853; “Two Loves and a Life” (with Tom Taylor), Adelphi, 20 March, 1854; “The Courier of Lyons” (afterwards called “The Lyons Mail”), Princess’s, 26 June 1854; “The King’s Rival” (with Tom Taylor), St. James’s, Oct. 1854; “Honour before Titles,” St. James’s, 3 Oct. 1854; “Peregrine Pickle,” St. James’s, Nov. 1854; “Art” (afterwards called “Nance Oldfield”), St. James’s, 17 April 1855; “The First Printer” (with Tom Taylor), Princess’s, 3 March 1856; “Never Too Late to Mend” (dramatized from his novel), Princess’s, 4 Oct. 1865; “The Double Marriage” (dramatized from novel “White Lies”), Queen’s Theatre, 24 Oct. 1867; adaptation of Tennyson’s “Dora,” Adelphi, 1 June 1867; “Foul Play” (with Dion Boucicault; dramatized from novel), Holborn Theatre, 1868 (revised version, called “The Scuttled Ship,” by Reade alone, Olympic, 1877); “Free Labour” (dramatized from novel, “Put Yourself in His Place”), 28 May 1870; “The Robust Invalid” (adapted from Molière), Adelphi, 15 June 1870; “Shilly Shally,” Gaiety, 1 April 1872; “Kate Peyton’s Lovers” (dramatized from novel “Griffith Gaunt”), Queen’s Theatre, 1 Oct. 1875; “Drink” (dramatized from Zola), Princess’s, 2 June 1879; “Love and Money” (with H. Pettitt), 18 Nov. 1882; “Single Heart and Double Face,” Edinburgh, Nov. 1883. Died, in London, 11 April 1884. Buried in Willesden Churchyard. Works: “Peg Woffington,” 1853; “Christie Johnstone,” 1853; “Two Loves and a Life” (with Tom Taylor), 1854; “The King’s Rival” (with Tom Taylor), 1854; “Masks and Faces” (with Tom Taylor), 1854; “It is Never Too Late to Mend,” 1856; “White Lies,” 1857; “The Course of True Love never did run Smooth,” 1857; “Jack of all Trades,” 1858; “Autobiography of a Thief,” 1858; “Love me Little, Love me Long,” 1859; “The Eighth Commandment,” 1860; “The Cloister and the Hearth,” 1861; “Hard Cash,” 1863; “Griffith Gaunt,” 1866; “Foul Play” (with Dion Boucicault), 1868; “Put Yourself in his Place,” 1870; “A Terrible Temptation,” 1871; “The Wandering Heir,” 1872; “A Simpleton,” 1873; “A Lost Art Revived,” 1873; “A Hero and a Martyr,” 1874; “Trade Malice,” 1875; “A Woman Hater,” 1877; “Readiana,” 1883. Posthumous: “The Perilous Secret,” 1884; “Singleheart and Doubleface,” 1884; “The Jilt, and Other Tales,” 1884; “Good Stories of Man and other Animals,” 1884; “Bible Characters,” 1888. Life: by C. L. and C. Reade, 1887.

Personal

  A tall man, more than thirty, fair-haired, and of agreeable talk and demeanor.

  I am quite sure that you—who loved and reverenced him [Charles Dickens] as he deserved—will be glad to have something that belonged to him familiarly, even though the thing is of no value in itself. Therefore I venture to send you this little pen-tray as a relic. It belonged to our little sitting-room at the office—a place that he was very fond of—and used very much, so that this little article was constantly under his eye, and associated with his familiar every-day life. Will you accept it from me with my love and regard? You don’t need to be told by me—still I think it will be pleasant to you—now—to have a fresh assurance of the affection and esteem in which he held you. You did not meet very often; but I never heard him speak of you except with the heartiest and most cordial expressions of admiration, respect, and personal affection.

  To a wonderful energy and virility of genius and temperament Charles Reade adds a more than feminine susceptibility and impatience when criticism attempts to touch him. With a faith in his own capacity and an admiration for his own works such as never were surpassed in literary history, he can yet be rendered almost beside himself by a disparaging remark from the obscurest critic in the corner of the poorest provincial newspaper. There is no pen so feeble anywhere but it can sting Charles Reade into something like delirium. He replies to every attack, and he discovers a personal enemy in every critic. Therefore he is always in quarrels, always assailing this man and being assailed by that, and to the very utmost of his power trying to prevent the public from appreciating or even recognizing the wealth of genuine manhood, truth, and feeling, which is bestowed everywhere in the rugged ore of his strange and paradoxical character. I am not myself one of Mr. Reade’s friends, or even acquaintances; but from those who are, and whom I know, I have always heard the one opinion of the sterling integrity, kindness, and trueheartedness of the man who so often runs counter to all principles of social amenity, and whose bursts of impulsive ill-humor have offended many who would fain have admired.

  Mrs. Seymour and I were old people, you know. During the nineteen years I lived in the same house with her she led an innocent life, a self-denying life, and a singularly charitable life. In the exercise of this grace there was scarcely a Scriptural prescript she did not fulfil to the letter. She was merciful to all God’s creatures; she took the stranger into her house for months; she cared for the orphan; she visited and nursed the sick; she comforted the afflicted in mind; she relieved the poor in various classes of life, constantly hiding her bounty from others, and sometimes from its very objects. Those charities are still continued out of her funds, and through the influence of her example. God drew her nearer to Him by five months of acute suffering. She bore her agonies (from cancer of the liver) with meek resignation, and sorrow for me, who was to lose her, but none for herself…. My grief for her is selfish. You know what I have lost—a peerless creature, wise, just, and full of genius, yet devoted to me. She alone sustained me in the hard battle of my life, and now, old and broken, I must totter on without her, sick, sad, and lonely. My remorse is for this. I had lived entirely for the world, and so disquieted her with my cares, instead of leading her on the path of peace, and robbed God of a saint, though not of a believer.

  In his undergraduate days the future novelist seems to have been rather Byronic. A tall graceful youngster, with a splendidly-proportioned figure and muscles to match, he attracted attention by his long flowing curls. Abhorring alcohol in every form as well as tobacco, he did not assimilate largely with his junior common-room, though he was far from unpopular. He read—in his own fashion—and at the age of twenty-one figured in the third class, and was at once elected fellow. His fellowship rendered him independent, and for the best part of twenty years he lived a life of incessant action, mostly in the open air. Nevertheless, unlike Lord Beaconsfield’s fine young English gentleman, he was devoted to books, and in effect was storing up material which afterwards enabled him to construct situations, not only stagey but real. At the time the man was very much a Guy Livingstone. He was a dead shot; he knocked Alfred Mynn round the field at Liverpool; he excelled as an archer and as a pedestrian; few if any could beat him in throwing a cast-net, and among other accomplishments he reckoned theatrical dancing.

  My acquaintance with him did not begin till his infirmity of deafness had grown to be a source of much inconvenience to him; but it certainly had not the effect, often attributed to it, of making him impatient or morose. His hollowed hand, and smiling, attentive face are always present in the picture which my memory draws of him. He expressed himself very strongly upon matters in which his feelings were moved, but they were always moved in the right direction, and though, when contending with an adversary on paper, he did not use the feather end of his pen, his heart was as soft as a woman’s. He was never moved by those petty jealousies which (with little reason, so far as my experience goes) are attributed to his craft, and the last time he spoke to me on literary subjects was in praise of one who might well have been considered a rival—Wilkie Collins.

  It was in the summer of 1876 that I first made the acquaintance of Charles Reade, at a little dinner given by Mr. John Coleman, then manager of the Queen’s Theatre…. Pleasant beyond measure was that night’s meeting; pleasanter still the friendly intimacy which followed, and lasted for years; for all the many distinguished men that I have met, Charles Reade, when you knew him thoroughly, was one of the gentlest, sincerest, and most sympathetic. With the intellectual strength and bodily height of an Anak, he possessed the quiddit and animal spirits of Tom Thumb. He was learned, but wore his wisdom lightly, as became a true English gentleman of the old school. His manners had the stateliness of the last generation, such manners as I had known in the scholar Peacock, himself a prince of taletellers; and, to women especially, he had the grace and gallantry of the good old band of literary knights. Yet with all his courtly dignity he was as frank-hearted as a boy, and utterly without pretence. What struck me at once in him was his supreme veracity. Above all shams and pretences, he talked only of what he knew; and his knowledge, though limited in range, was large and memorable…. A magnificent whist and chess player, he would condescend to spend whole evenings at the primitive game of “squales.” In these and all other respects, he was the least bookish, the least literary person that ever used a pen.

  My first interview with the eminent author, in 1863, left upon me an impression of breadth and amplitude which, though in a measure due to accident and artificial circumstances, remained undisturbed throughout the course of a long and unbroken friendship. The house he lived in, No. 6 Bolton Row, was of unusual magnitude, and the room in which he received his guests was of corresponding dimensions. A table which in point of size might have served for billiards was strewn with enormous sheets of tinted paper, upon which he was writing, in a bold and heavy hand, a forthcoming installment of “Hard Cash.” His portly frame completely filled an exceptionally spacious armchair, and as he rose to give greeting he was easily able to look down upon the visitors, though one of them was above the average stature. His manner, dignified, gracious, and extremely gentle, was in thorough harmony with the largeness of the surroundings, and in the conversation which ensued there was certainly nothing that indicated a narrow side to his character.

  Magdalen College, Oxford, is one of the those almshouses for the rich which abound in England…. From this charity fund, Reade drew not less than $2,000 a year for the remaining fifty years of his life—$100,000 in all—for which he never rendered one particle of service of any kind, unless we except assistance in defeating parliamentary efforts to abolish the whole thieving job and use the money as the donor has directed. What wonder is it that he shared the disgusting English view of the relation of meum and tuum as far as the rights of debtor and creditor were concerned? A debt is a misfortune and a dun is a bore. If, when I hold another man’s money, he asks for it, he insults me…. It may be well to look at the story of his relations with Mrs. Seymour. His Fellowship would be forfeited by marriage. Mrs. Seymour was an actress at the Haymarket, “above mediocrity,” and “well-looking off the stage.” Reade moved to her house, and afterward took her to his; introduced her to everybody as his housekeeper; was never separated from her for the remaining nineteen years of her life; mourned her death as a fatal blow to his happiness; called her his “lost darling;” was never really himself after he lost her, and was buried by her side. The biographer (Rev. Compton Reade) says everything in his power to prove that their relations were purely platonic. He fails signally.

  Reade was through life of a litigious and somewhat vain disposition, and, convinced that he was receiving inadequate remuneration alike from his plays and his two novels, he embarked on a series of lawsuits, which proved very disastrous to his pecuniary position. From Bentley, the publisher of his two novels, he received only 30l. apiece. An action at law resulted in his being mulcted in costs to the amount of 220l. No more successful were six suits which he brought in vindication of what he alleged to be his rights in his dramatic work. In 1860 he attacked in a pamphlet called “The Eighth Commandment” such thefts of the products of the brain as those from which he imagined himself to be a sufferer. In the same work he advocated a wider scheme of international copyright, and denounced the system of wholesale piratical “adaptation” from the French dramatists.

The Cloister and the Hearth, 1861

  I do not say that the whole of life, as it was at the end of the fourteenth century, is in “The Cloister and the Hearth.” But I do say, that there is portrayed so vigorous, lifelike, and truthful a picture of a time long gone by, and differing in almost every particular from our own, that the world has never seen its like. To me it is a picture of the past more faithful than anything in the works of Scott. As one reads it, one feels in the very atmosphere of the century; one breathes the air just before the Great Dawn of Learning and Religion; it is still twilight, but the birds are twittering already on the boughs; it is a time when men are weary of the past; there is no freshness or vigour in the poetry; all the tunes are old tunes…. Comparison between “The Cloister and the Hearth” and “Romola” is forced upon one. Both books treat of the same period; similar pictures should be presented in the pages of both. Yet—what a difference! In the man’s work we find action, life, movement, surprise, reality. In the woman’s work we find languor, tedium, and the talk of nineteenth-century puppets dressed in fifteenth-century clothes.

  For my own part. I would rather have written “The Cloister and the Hearth” than half-a-dozen “Romolas,” and I would rather have been Charles Reade, great, neglected, and misunderstood in his generation, than the pretentious and pedagogic Talent which earned the tinsel crown of contemporary homage, too speedily dethroned, and, in the good time that is coming for Genius, justly forgotten.

  A story better conceived or better composed, better constructed or better related, than “The Cloister and the Hearth,” it would be difficult to find anywhere…. The variety of life, the vigour of action, the straightforward and easy mastery displayed at every step in every stage of the fiction, would of themselves be enough to place “The Cloister and the Hearth” among the very greatest masterpieces of narrative; while its tender truthfulness of sympathy, its ardour and depth of feeling, the constant sweetness of its humour, the frequent passion of its pathos, are qualities in which no other tale of adventure so stirring and incident so inexhaustible can pretend to a moment’s comparison with it—unless we are foolish enough to risk a reference to the name by which no contemporary name can hope to stand higher, or shine brighter, for prose or for verse, than does that of Shakespeare’s greatest contemporary by the name of Shakespeare.

  Can scarcely be spoken of with praise too high. It is like one of those mediæval pictures in which we see in a succession of scenes, which occupy what in a more artificial piece would be simply background, the whole life and progress of the man whose picture, whether a portrait or a leading incident in his life, is the chief subject. The wonderful romance of Gerard and his companion, with its hundred episodes which are not archaic, and bear no mark of the midnight oil, but fresh as the breath of the primitive country with all its fierce little walled towns and noble castles and hospitable convents, rolls out before us in endless detail, without ever withdrawing our attention from the noble young figure, all ardour, purity and faith which is the chief interest. “The Cloister and the Hearth” is one of the books which we should put into our list for the furnishing and endowment of that desert island, for which we are so often asked to choose an imaginary library.

  I think I must have worn out more copies of this book than of any other…. No novel of Scott’s approaches the “Cloister” in lofty humanity, in sublimity of pathos. The last fifty pages of the tale reach an elevation of feeling that Scott never touched or dreamed of touching. And the sentiment is sane and honest, too: the author reaches to the height of his great argument easily and without strain. It seems to me that, as an appeal to the feelings, the page that tells of Margaret’s death is the finest thing in fiction. It appeals for a score of reasons, and each reason is a noble one…. Reade wrote some twenty novels beside “The Cloister and the Hearth,” and not one of the twenty approaches it. One only—“Griffith Gaunt”—is fit to be named in the same day with it; and “Griffith Gaunt” is marred by an insincerity in the plot which vitiates, and is at once felt to vitiate, the whole work. On everything he wrote before and after “The Cloister” Reade’s essential vulgarity of mind is written large. That he shook it off in that great instance is one of the miracles of literary history.

  Reade’s greatest novel, the mediæval romance, in four volumes, entitled “The Cloister and the Hearth,” was published in 1861. About one-fifth had originally appeared in 1859 under the title of “A good Fight” in “Once a Week,” and the circulation of the periodical was consequently increased by twenty thousand. The tale was gradually expanded in the two following years. The scene is laid in Holland, Germany, France, and Italy of the fifteenth century, and the manners, customs, politics, and familiar conversation of the epoch are successfully realised. There are incidentally introduced, along with the imaginary characters, historical personages like Froissart, Gringoire, Villon, Deschamps, Coquillart, Luther, and Erasmus, the last being portrayed as a fascinating child. Sir Walter Besant, in his introduction to the cheap edition of 1894, characterised the work as the greatest historical novel in the language. According to Mr. Swinburne, “a story better conceived, better constructed, or better related, it would be difficult to find anywhere.”

  Is universally admitted to be Reade’s masterpiece, and well deserves to be ranked among the best historical novels of the century. There are many who go further, and maintain that it is the finest single fiction of the Victorian era. It is a tale of the fifteenth century, and brings before the reader with startling vividness the cruelty and sordidness, the heroisms and the consecrations of life in the deep darkness that preceded the dawn of the Reformation of Europe. The knowledge displayed is immense. There are humour and pathos in abundance. The canvas is crowded with all kinds of figures—beggar and thief, adventurer and peasant, priest and noble, grouped with admirable effect, and taking part in a series of intensely dramatic scenes and adventures. The whole tale moves at a singular elevation, and conveys a sense of unwonted power. As to its main part, the story is of the rare constancy and pure affection of two sorely-tried hearts sent to an early grave by a combination of fateful circumstances such as could only have arisen in these far-off times.

  Reade’s masterpiece is a historical novel, “The Cloister and the Hearth” (1860), a story of the early Reformation and of the life of Erasmus. To the construction of this work Reade brought his laborious method of getting up his facts, but in spite of its learning the book is one of the three or four best historical novels since Scott.

Griffith Gaunt, 1866

  I have been sickened to see and hear the things vented against your noble piece of work; I found in it what, let me say, I always find in you, a sincere and loyal love of that which renders beauty beautiful and manhood best. I found in it Nature, too, who does not read the weekly journals enough to forget why Moses wrote the Decalogue, nor what reason She gave him first of all to do it. I am no novel reader, and in morals they call me a Puritan—but I admire and marvel at your exquisite and most healthy and excellent story, which teaches the force of a true love over an unspiritual temperament, and paints a lady that is indeed every inch a lady. To be brief, I lent the book to my sister when I had read it: and will defend it as an enrichment of the best English literature with hearty good will, at any place and time.

  If such a story as “Griffith Gaunt,”… be compared with almost any ordinary novel of the day, the first note of difference will be found in the overwhelming amount of incident in the former as compared with the latter; the second, that the descriptions of persons, scenery, place, voice, gesture, &c., necessary in every novel, are much shorter in “Griffith Gaunt” than the other. The third, that the conversations do not drag and seem too long or discursive, but that they carry on the action and develop the characters.

  But for tragic power, for unfaltering command over all the springs and secrets of terror and pity, it is not comparable with the book which would beyond all question be generally acknowledged by all competent judges, as his masterpiece, if its magnificent mechanism were not vitiated by a moral flaw in the very mainspring of the action. This mainspring, if we may believe the subtitle of “Griffith Gaunt,” is supplied by the passion of jealousy. But the vile crime on which the whole action of the latter part of the story depends, and but for which the book would want its very finest effects of pathos and interest, is not prompted by jealousy at all: it is prompted by envy. A man tied by law to a wife whom he believes unfaithful has inadvertently, by no fault of his, won the heart of a woman who believes him free, and has nursed him back from death to life. Unable to offer her marriage, and aware of her innocent regard for him, he loyally determines to withdraw from her society. An old suitor of hers meets and taunts him in the hour of his leave-taking. Instantly, rather than face the likelihood of a rival’s triumph, the coward turns back and offers his hand to the girl, whose good offices he requites by deliberate betrayal of her trust and innocence to secret and incurable dishonour. This is no more an act of jealousy than murder by slow poison is an act of impatience. It is an act of envy; and one of the basest on record in fiction or in fact…. Great as was usually the care displayed in the composition of Mr. Reade’s other works, and great as was sometimes the skill which ensured success to this ungrudging and conscientious labour of love, there is not another of his books which as an all but absolute and consummate work of art can be set beside or near this masterpiece.

  He found his material anywhere, in the village, in the country town, in London, at sea, with a knowledge and acquaintance with all which was always broad and full of light wherever he chose to place the centre, and with an indifference to time as well as place which was a high test of his wonderful power. For though he was essentially a writer of the nineteenth century, and his books a record of the manners and morals of his day, yet his greatest work is a historical romance of the fifteenth century—and one of the most powerful of his lesser romances, “Griffith Gaunt,” contains an admirable and living picture of English life a hundred years ago, no book of costumes as so many are, but a most animated transcript of a time which is entirely past. This work is not to be compared with “Esmond” as a work of art, but it has a strength and swiftness and power of rapid realisation which is as remarkable in its way. It is, however, what is called a disagreeable book, and therefore has never had the popularity it deserves.

General

  Mr. Reade’s scenes are too limited to make us at home in them; his characters are too sketchy for us to feel familiarly conversant with them. His men and women do not seem to us as life-companions, but rather as passing acquaintances, whom we have met at a dinner-party, in a rail-car, or at a watering-place; with whom we have passed a pleasant hour or two, but of whom we do not know enough to put them upon our list of assured friends; nor have they that innate power of fascination which enables them, as a transient acquaintance sometimes will, to cling to the memory nolens volens. Instead of this, we perceive that they will soon yield place to successive visitors of nearly the same calibre, and we think no more about them. Even Christie Johnstone, the freshest and least hackneyed character, appears, after the interval of a week, not as a whole and well-defined woman; but we see in the retrospect only a strong arm, linked to a voice with a singular local patois, with now and then a whiff of not over-fresh herrings; while brilliant Peg Woffington, sweet Mable Vane, and sorrow-bleached Rachael, have all become airy phantoms, undistinguishable amid the numerous successors to public favor that have appeared since their advent, from the English and American press.

  Charles Reade is not a clever writer merely, but a great one,—how great, only a careful résumé of his productions can tell us. We know too well that no one can take the place of him who has just left us, and who touched so truly the chords of every passion; but out of the ranks some one must step now to the leadership so deserted,—for Dickens reigns in another region,—and whether or not it shall be Charles Reade depends solely upon his own election: no one else is so competent, and nothing but wilfulness or vanity need prevent him,—the wilfulness of persisting in certain errors, or the vanity of assuming that he has no farther to go. He needs to learn the calmness of a less variable temperature and a truer equilibrium, less positive sharpness and more philosophy; he will be a thorough master, when the subject glows in his forge and he himself remains unheated…. Charles Reade’s style, which, after the current inanities, is as inspiriting as a fine breeze on the upland; it tingles with vitality; he seems to bring to his work a superb physical strength, which he employs impartially in the statement of a trifle or the storming of a city; and if on this page he handles a ship in a sea-fight with the skill and force of a Viking, on the other he picks up a pin cleaner of the adjacent dust than weaker fingers would do it…. Charles Reade is the prose for Browning. The temperament of the two in their works is almost identical, having first allowed for the delicate femininity proper to every poet and the richness that Browning lavishes, till it strikes the world no more than the lavish gold of the sun, the lavish blue of the sky, Reade, taking warning, hoards and lets out only by glimpses. Yet such glimpses! for beauty and brilliancy and strength, when they do occur, unrivalled.

  I have—read—through—“Very Hard Cash;” and very hard it is to read. Reade has some pretty remarkable powers,—powers of description and of characterization; but the moment he touches the social relations, and should be dramatic, he is struck with total incapacity.

  Charles Reade is, as an author, very well worth studying. He is so thorough in what he does, so determined and so intense, that he falls into exaggeration, and yet it is doubtful whether he over-paints the truth. It is the languid age that is in fault, and not the vivid author.

  Those who have any knowledge of English classics need not be reminded of the broad, practical Christianity which pervades the writings of Charles Reade, whom Dr. Stanton evidently heard of for the first time the other day. All his works bear witness against this charge of rationalism. “Peg Woffington,” “Christie Johnstone,” “Put Yourself in His Place,” “The Cloister and the Hearth”—where are we to find nobler lessons of life or a more refreshing Christianity than in these models of masculine fancy and sterling Anglo-Saxon literature?

  We do not know if we are prurient and prudish, which is what Mr. Reade has called some of his critics; it shall be as he likes about that; but we feel it laid upon us, as they say, to give it as our judgment that in this last book of Mr. Reade’s there is an amount of gestation and parturition, and wet-nursing, not to mention life with the demi-monde, that makes “A Terrible Temptation” rather disagreeable to us, and, we fear, a book of dubious tendency…. Usually Mr. Reade is—we had almost said, a pure writer. We should hesitate, however, to apply to him just that word, for while he certainly is not an impure writer, yet purity is a word not very precisely descriptive of him. The passion of love is what he has always dealt with; and with him love is always the flesh-and-blood love of entirely human lovers. It is clearly the love of the sexes. As we say, however, Mr. Reade usually treats of it without coarseness, although rarely without a warmth which, to speak within bounds, is not always marked by delicacy. And in the case of Lady Bassett and Mr. Angelo he passes over the boundary, and becomes coarse to the point of indecency…. It is, however, as we have said, very interesting and very clever, and although Mr. Reade appears to have only too little respect for himself, and not enough for his readers either, it is certain that in losing the power or the will to delight he has not diminished in the least his power to amuse; and, moreover, might, if he would, keep us all pleased and excited, without hovering on the perilous verge of forbidden regions, or going over the border.

  He is a magnificent specimen of the modern special correspondent, endowed with the additional and unique gift of a faculty for throwing his report into the form of a thrilling story. But it requires something more than this, something higher than this, to make a great novelist whom the world will always remember. Mr. Reade is unsurpassed in the second class of English novelists, but he does not belong to the front rank. His success has been great in its way, but it is for an age and not for time.

  After nine years of nominal connection with the bar, he produced the first of the romances by which he is known—the sprightly and charming little story of “Peg Woffington.” There are not wanting those who regard this as Reade’s most artistic and finished work. It is certainly free from many of those eccentricities and obtrusive mannerisms which too frequently mar the effect of his later books; while it has all the dramatic power of his imagination, and all the raciness which he is able to impart to the dialogues of his characters. An even simpler and more touching story was that of “Christie Johnstone,” published in 1853; a story more popular than “Peg Woffington,” and which refutes the frequent critical assertion that Reade is lacking in tenderness and sympathy…. If popularity be the test of literary rank, Charles Reade has perhaps assumed the place left vacant by Charles Dickens; for the works of no living novelist are seized, read, and noticed, with more avidity.

  There is no one I admire so much. There is a swing of easy power about him which is beyond praise.

  Charles Reade in his novel work resembles the old dramatists. If he takes his reader to a North Country fishing village, he does not make up an elaborate picture of the houses, the boats, the nets spread out upon the seashore, the smell of the fish, the narrow streets, the reek and the dirt of it. I do not say that in some hands such a description is not pleasing, but it is not part of Reade’s method. He is not a painter of scenery nor of houses; he does not care for picturesque “bits” and effects of light unless they help his story; he is a painter of men and women. Therefore, in the space of half a page or thereabouts, he introduces us briefly to the kind of folks we are to meet, and then sets them to talk for themselves. Not a bit of furniture; not an inch of tapestry; no blue china; no cabinets; yet, when all is told and the curtain drops we know the place where the people live better than if we had read pages of description. This is the art of the dramatist…. He resembles no other writer living or dead. His merits are his own, and they are those of the first order of writers. He cannot be classified: In order to be classified, a man must be either a leader or one of a following…. In fine, he paints women as they are, men as they are, things as they are. What we call genius is first the power of seeing men, women, and things as they are—most of us, being without genius, are purblind—and then the power of showing them by means of “invention”—by the grafting of “invention” upon fact. No living man has shown greater power of grasping fact and of weaving invention upon it than Charles Reade.

  He does not seem to have been born an artist in language…. The burnished and incisive style of Mr. Reade, his sedulous and sustained literary workmanship, ought to commend him strongly to French readers, who have been taught to exact a like merit from their own novelists. Another characteristic trait would be better appreciated on the other side of the Channel than at home, and that is the dramatic quality of his narratives. Many of them have been, and all might be, adapted for the stage…. There is, it seems to us, a tendency to underrate Mr. Reade’s skill in characterization. It is true that none of his conceptions have niched themselves in our remembrance in the sense that Little Nell, Dick Swiveller, Colonel Newcome and Major Pendennis are household denizens; yet we venture to predict that Christie Johnstone and Peg Woffington, Triplet and David Dodd will be found to have a firm hold upon the next, as well as the present generation. We do not recall one book of Mr. Reade’s whose chief actors are not individualized, and whose features, physical and mental, are not deeply printed on the mind, being almost always self-betrayed in action or dialogue, and very seldom catalogued by the author…. Mr. Reade is always a realist, as much so as was Mr. Trollope, although his realism is of an artistic, not a mechanical sort.

  On the question of prison reform, of the lunacy laws, of copyright in plays and books, of criminal procedure, he appealed to the great English people, and invariably triumphed. But the works in which he made his immortal appeals are not pamphlets; they are masterpieces of realistic imagination. It is as true to say of him that he was only a “copious pamphleteer” as it was to say of Thackeray that he was no gentleman, of Dickens that he was only a cockney humorist, or Shelley that he was merely a transcendentalist, of Wordsworth that he had no “form,” and of Shakespeare that he had no “style,” all which weighty assertions have been made within man’s memory by the criticism that is contemporary, or by the perversity which is “not for an age, but for all time.”

  Charles Reade, as a lover of justice and mercy, a hater of atrocity and foul play, may claim a place in the noble army of which Voltaire was in the last century, as Hugo is in this, the indefatigable and lifelong leader; the great company of witnesses, by right of articulate genius and might of intelligent appeal, against all tenets and all theories of sophists and of saints which tend directly or indirectly to pamper or to stimulate, to fortify or to excuse, the tyrannous instinct or appetite for cruelty innate and latent alike in peoples of every race and every creed…. In the power of realising and vivifying what he could only have known by research or by report, Reade is second only to Defoe; while in liveliness and fluency of narrative he is generally as superior alike to Defoe and to Balzac as he is inferior to the one in depth and grasp of intellect, to the other in simplicity and purity of self-forgetting and self-effacing imagination…. In Reade the properties and functions of the playwright were much less thoroughly fused and harmonised with the properties and functions of the narrator. The work of Dumas as a novelist is never the worse and sometimes the better for his experience of the stage; that of Reade is sometimes the better and sometimes the worse for his less distinguished experiences in the same line. In this respect he stands midway between Dumas and Scott, who was hampered as a dramatist either by his habit of narrative writing or by his sense of a necessity to be on his guard against the influence of that habit.

  All his sympathies were with the class from which he originally sprang. He was never able, as has been said over and over again, to draw ladies and gentlemen, and was fond of representing them as awful examples of cold-blooded selfishness…. His interest was in characters and situations, and the distinctions of classes counted for very little with him, except for dramatic purposes. At the time of his death his reputation had suffered a serious decline, owing to the fact, among others, that he appeared to have done his best work, and to have become reckless as to his position. He was not content with the natural vigor of a thoroughly masculine style, but he continually attempted to reinforce it by tricks and devices which were sometimes amusing, sometimes contemptible, and always weak and trivial…. His range was perhaps not very great; his heroines all bore a strong family resemblance to each other; his men were not characters taken from life, like Thackeray’s, but they were made of flesh and blood, and hoped and feared and loved and struggled, so that their life was for the time our own.

  There can be little doubt that “Griffith Gaunt” is Reade’s masterpiece…. A strain of health and manliness runs through all Reade’s work: it is not all meant for babes, but it is always on the side of morality. No more unfair charge was ever uttered than that which denounced “Griffith Gaunt” and “A Terrible Temptation” as indecent books. Reade is never afraid to handle themes which to delicate susceptibilities may savour of indelicacy; but it is only the prurient prude who could condemn his manner of treatment. For his own part, he is an enthusiastic defender of Faith and Religion: the “last words to mankind” which he had placed on his tombstone breathe a spirit of the simplest Christianity. A vigorous writer, a clear-headed thinker, untroubled by metaphysical mirage or philosophic doubt, with a rare eye for picturesque effects and a rare appreciation for the subtler details of character, Charles Reade was almost, if not quite, a genius, and only just failed in being an artist.

  The death of Charles Reade, at the age of seventy, withdraws from among us another of that very small group of writers who can lay claim to genius as distinguished from mere talent. Granted that it was not genius of one of the higher types, yet genius is to be seen unmistakably in all his best work, marking it with verve, originality, and vigorous action, and in particular exhibiting so much ingenuity in construction of plots and the invention of telling situations that it seems strange that it is as novelist rather than as dramatist (though he essayed both careers) that his reputation was made and is likely to rest.

  “Never Too Late to Mend” was far from being his last story. It was his first great ship launched out into the sea of novel-writing. His brain was teeming with plans, and it was only necessary for him to watch the retreating figures of one drama, to behold another company entering by the opposite wing upon the theatre of his mind…. A book [“The Eighth Commandment”] which stands among the first of Charles Reade’s works in dramatic power. His sketch of the life of M. Maquet is unrivaled, and if novel-readers fail to read the book for lack of a love-story, no author should fail to read it as an example of vigorous wit infused into a dry subject.

  Into the merits of our author’s quarrel with the publishers it would be superfluous to enter, if, indeed, such a quarrel existed outside the region of his sensitive imagination. That he benefited is most improbable. Mrs. Seymour gave him practical assistance of a very valuable kind, but he belonged to the class of penny-wise gentry who leave the pounds to shift for themselves; and it is a fact that he omitted to square accounts with the late Mr. Trübner for so many years that his claim was actually statute-run. Fortunately for him, he had to deal with a man of scrupulous integrity, and thus obtained his own. But it is none the less true that he was totally unconscious of Trübner being in his debt, just as sometimes he would forget for twelve or eighteen months to draw the check for his Fellowship from the Bursar of Magdalen. From a business point of view, nevertheless, he was fully justified in rescuing his copyrights from Messrs. Bentley. At present these books are a genuine literary property, and have a steady sale. In short, if at the moment penalized to the extent of £150, and put to the excitement and trouble of two lawsuits, he amply recouped himself. Moreover, his victory was a memorable one, since, whereas in the first action, which failed, he employed as his counsel, Mr., afterwards Mr. Justice, Lush, a lawyer second only to Cockburn, who, nevertheless, broke down, in the second action he trusted solely to the forensic genius of Charles Reade, barrister at law of Lincoln’s Inn, who never before had held a brief, but who none the less triumphed where Lush had failed.

  Vitalize this dull reality by vivid feeling; put passion into everything; eliminate all that does not stimulate; be as fruitful in incidents as Trollope is in commonplaces; envelope the reader in a whirl of events; drag him violently on through a series of minor unexpected catastrophes to the grand unexpected catastrophe at the end; heap stimulants on him until he feels like a mad Malay running amuck through the streets—and you have Charles Reade, the great master of melodramatic effect.

  In “Griffith Gaunt” and still more markedly in “A Terrible Temptation,” Reade overstepped the boundaries which separate the fiction of our tongue from the license of continental writers. The main objection made to the first named book at the time of its publication was its deliberate portrayal, with the utmost detail, of the life of the hero as the husband of two women at once; loving them both in different fashions, but to an equal degree; and the final winning of him by one of the women on her bearing him a child. This Reade defended with characteristic fierceness, on the score of dramatic necessity—inventing the alliteration of “Prurient Prudes” to fit his assailants. Good men accepted his plea of dramatic necessity. Edward Arnold wrote to him: “I found it in Nature…. I am no novel-reader, and in morals they call me a Puritan—but I admire and marvel at your exquisite and most healthy story, which teaches the force of a true love over an unspiritual temperament.” But even if we admit his plea on the general issue, what can be said in defence of the particular offence of putting indelicate words into the delicate lips of maidenhood? What motive could there have been save the suggesting of impure thoughts to the reader? ’Tis but a straw, but it marks the drift of the current.

  Charles Reade collected incident as Herbert Spencer collected sociological data, and his study was almost like the counting-room of a man of affairs, with its pigeon-holed papers and array of scrap-books.

  Mr. Charles Reade’s incorporation of fragments of the “dialogues” of Erasmus in the “Cloister and the Hearth,” and of Swift’s “Polite Conversation” in the “Wandering Heir,” was a proper and even a praiseworthy use of preëxisting material. But Mr. Reade did not always remain within his rights, and it is impossible to doubt that his “Portrait” was first hung in the private gallery of Mme. Reybaud, and that some of his “Hard Cash” was filched from the coffers of the “Pauvres de Paris” of MM. Brisebarre and Nus. Mme. Reybaud’s picture was not a Duchess of Devonshire which a man might so fall in love with that he could not help stealing it—indeed, it is not easy to discover why Mr. Reade wanted it; but the drama of MM. Brisebarre and Nus is ingeniously pathetic, and although no one has made as skilful use of its fable as Mr. Reade, it has served to suggest also Miss Braddon’s “Rupert Godwin, Banker,” Mr. Sterling Coyne’s “Fraud and its Victims,” and Mr. Dion Boucicault’s “Streets of New-York.”

  It [“Christie Johnstone”] seems to me still—allowing for a deal of irrelevant matter that is now out of date, if attractive at any time—one of the most beautiful and dramatic stories ever written. I do not find it easy to read it without a quickened pulse, and a ready response to its touches of humanity. One of its finest scenes is that in which the heroine Christie, the Newhaven fish-wife, sets sail on the Firth of Forth to save a young artist, who, while bathing, has been carried away by the tide and in danger of losing his life. The motives that prompt her to the rescue are purely human. She effects her purpose, but is not aware that the man she rescues is her own temporarily estranged lover. The treatment of the incident is praiseworthy in the extreme, but unsuited, except in a mutilated form, for presenting on the boards of a theatre. On the other hand it contains scenes that would act admirably.

  It may be noted that in nearly all of Reade’s exceedingly fine fictions, crime is the pivot on which the action turns, as in the case of the “Double Marriage,” “Hard Cash,” and many others. But crime, treated as Reade treats it, is made to yield its most salutary lessons; and, as crime unhappily exists, novels of this type may be justly regarded as fulfilling an ethical as well as a recreative purpose.

  I ought not to omit from the list of these favorites an author who was then beginning to have his greatest vogue, and who somehow just missed of being a very great one. We were all reading his jaunty, nervy, knowing books, and some of us were questioning whether we ought not to set him above Thackeray and Dickens and George Eliot, tutti quanti, so great was the effect that Charles Reade had with our generation. He was a man who stood at the parting of the ways between realism and romanticism, and if he had been somewhat more of a man he might have been the master of a great school of English realism; but, as it was, he remained content tt use the materials of realism and produce the effect of romanticism. He saw that life itself infinitely outvalued anything that could be feigned about it, but its richness seemed to corrupt him, and he had not the clear ethical conscience which forced George Eliot to be realistic when probably her artistic prepossessions were romantic. As yet, however, there was no reasoning of the matter, and Charles Reade was writing books of tremendous adventure and exaggerated character, which he prided himself on deriving from the facts of the world around him. He was intoxicated with the discovery he made that the truth was beyond invention, but he did not know what to do with the truth in art after he had found it in life, and to this day the English mostly do not. We young people were easily taken with his glittering error, and we read him with much the same fury that he wrote. “Never Too Late To Mend;” “Love Me Little, Love Me Long;” “Christie Johnstone;” “Peg Woffington;” and then, later, “Hard Cash,” “The Cloister and the Hearth,” “Foul Play,” “Put Yourself in His Place”—how much they all meant once, or seemed to mean!

  In passing we may remark that Reade’s humour is not of a high order, being for the most part of a very commonplace burlesque type. He has comic passages, it is true, such as the death-bed scene of Jane Hardie; but these flashes of fun are not produced intentionally, and owe their piquancy principally to their delightful incongruity…. He does elevate the banners of purity, truth, and love—and then blinds us by flapping them in our faces. He advocates district-visiting; but in two of his books he tells us what a thankless office it is, and how little sympathy the objects of our charity have for any woes but their own…. He makes goodness generally, save in the case of Gerard and Christie Johnstone, a spiritless, colorless thing. We feel, with Mark Twain, that moral excellence is petrefication, and religious sensibility a disease; and “we don’t want to be like any of his good people, we prefer a little healthy wickedness.”… One of Reade’s books, “The Cloister and the Hearth,” has the vital spark in it that will live; the others will not.

  It [“Hard Cash”] is the most severe, relentless, inspiring exposition of the potentiality of oppression which may exist in a private lunatic asylum that has ever been written. It ended the irresponsible private asylum in England, and it made the treatment of the insane by severity well-nigh an impossibility in any asylum.