Charles Reade

English novelist and playwright

• Born: June 8, 1814
• Birthplace: Near Ipsden, Oxfordshire, England
• Died: April 11, 1884
• Place of death: London, England

Biography

A dramatist and novelist who enjoyed great popular acclaim in his lifetime, Charles Reade (reed) was born at Ipsden House in Oxfordshire on June 8, 1814. He was the youngest of the eleven children born to a wealthy family of landed gentry. Unlike his brothers, who received the usual “public school” education, Reade was educated at home by tutors; as a result, he was faced with difficulties, personal and academic, when he entered Oxford at seventeen. He had not learned to get along with people, nor had he acquired the academic knowledge he should have had. During his years at Oxford, from 1832 to 1835, Reade received honors—apparently more by luck than ability and, in one case, by absolute chicanery. In 1835 he was elected a fellow of the college. Later he went to London and studied law, and in 1843 he was admitted to the bar, although he never actively practiced law. He also tried medicine at Edinburgh and considered a church calling, experiences that later found expression in his novels.

From 1837 to 1848 Reade traveled around Europe, adding to his collection of violins. Around 1840 he fell in love with a woman in Scotland whom he wanted to marry, but the match was suddenly broken off. When he went back to Scotland years later to search for her, she was dead. The marriage would in any case have been difficult for Reade, because he was dependent on his don’s salary, which he had to remain celibate to keep. Moreover, his family may have been opposed to his marrying a woman of lower social rank. The experience later worked its way into The Cloister and the Hearth, Reade’s best-known work.

Returning to London in 1849, Reade began to write plays. His first successful dramatic production was a three-act comedy, The Ladies’ Battle, which was staged at the Royal Olympic Theatre in 1851. Within two years, Reade produced five other plays and made many friends among theatrical people, among them Laura Seymour, a well-known actress, who was his mistress and adviser until her death in 1879.

It was at Seymour’s suggestion that Reade first turned to fiction. She recommended that he transform one of his plays into a novel, and so Masks and Faces became Peg Woffington. In 1856 Reade’s first long novel, It Is Never Too Late to Mend, was published; thereafter, Reade turned his efforts almost exclusively to fiction. Reade’s greatest novel, The Cloister and the Hearth, appeared in October of 1861; an early, much shorter version had been published earlier under the title “A Good Fight” in the magazine Once a Week.

The Cloister and the Hearth deals with the manners, customs, politics, and economics of life in fifteenth century Europe. Its title concerns the novel’s central dualism: Holland is the hearth, a place that offers hope to the tale’s lovers, Gerard and Margaret. Italy is the cloister, the place where Gerard becomes Brother Clement of the Dominican Order and fails to find domestic bliss with Margaret, who has located him after a period of separation only to have to live apart from him. Depicting the dangers, discomforts, and glories of the Middle Ages, The Cloister and the Hearth was based on Desiderus Erasmus’s 1607 account of his life. Reade’s novel contains, as do his other works, exciting incidents and depictions of social inequity; the bulk of its chapters are devoted to the heroism of common folk. Notably, the novel has an antiheroic thesis: Ordinary men and women do great deeds and suffer noble sorrows daily. The plot hinges on the central characters’ picaresque journey from Holland to Rome to Holland. The story ends with Gerard and Margaret’s son still a youth in school; he would grow up to become Erasmus, the great theologian and humanist of the Reformation.

Probably under the influence of his friend Charles Dickens, Reade turned from historical romances to problem novels such as Hard Cash, Griffith Gaunt, and Foul Play. During his long career, Reade wrote nearly forty novels and plays, most of which are now forgotten. The plays are all melodramas, while the novels tend to be pieces of sensational fiction. In both, his plots turn on such melodramatic formulas as the hairbreadth escape and the sentimental solution; only The Cloister and the Hearth continues to attract readers.

Reade thought that his dramatic work was more important than his fiction. Ironically, his love of drama did not add much to his literary reputation or financial success; as a novelist, however, he made a considerable amount of money. He died on Good Friday, April 11, 1884, at 3 Blomfield Villas, London, and was buried in Willesden Churchyard beside Laura Seymour.

Bibliography

Burns, Wayne. Charles Reade: A Study in Victorian Authorship. New York: Bookman Associates, 1961. Draws on Reade’s notebooks and other primary documents.

Elwin, Malcolm. Charles Reade. 1931. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, 1969. Biography contains critical commentary on Reade’s works. Elwin notes that Reade was uniformly respected by his peers.

Frierson, William C. “Some Remarks on Representative Late Victorians.” In The English Novel in Transition: 1885-1940. New York: Cooper Square, 1965. Regards Reade as having a dime-novel temperament that satisfied his reading public’s preferences.

Smith, Elton E. Charles Reade. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Includes chapters on Reade’s dramas and novels and a selected bibliography.

Sutcliffe, Emerson. “Plotting in Reade’s Novels.” PMLA 47 (September, 1932). Argues that Reade had a natural bent toward compact narrative but nevertheless produced lengthy novels.