Reade, CHARLES, novelist and playwright, was born at Ipsden House on 8th June 1814. The youngest of eleven, he came on both sides of good lineage, his father an Oxfordshire squire, his mother a clever Evangelical; from her he 'inherited his dramatic instinct.' After five years (all flogging) at Ifley, and six under two other and milder private tutors, in 1831 he gained a demyship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and in 1835, having taken a third class in honours, was duly elected to a lay fellowship. Next year he entered at Lincoln's Inn, and in 1843 was called to the bar, meanwhile having made the first of many tours abroad and at home, and developed a craze for trading in violins. 'I studied,' he tells us, 'the great art of Fiction for fifteen years before I presumed to write a line of it;' and it was not till 1850 that he put pen seriously to paper, 'writing first for the stage—about thirteen dramas, which nobody would play.' Through one of these dramas, however, he formed his platonic friendship with Mrs Seymour, a warm-hearted actress, who from 1854 till her death in 1879 kept house for him. She animated, counselled, guided him; and, apart from his quarrels and lawsuits (which were many), his life after 1852 is little except a record of the production of plays and novels, by the former of which he generally lost money, by the latter won profit and fame. The plays include Masks and Faces (1852), written in conjunction with Tom Taylor, and having Peg Woffington for its leading character; Gold (1853), the germ, and Sera Nunquam (1865), the dramatised form, of Never too Late; and Drink (1879), an adaptation of Zola's L'Assommoir. Of his eighteen novels may be mentioned Peg Woffington (1853); Christie Johnstone (1853), the Newhaven fisher lass; It is Never too Late to Mend (1856), a tale of prison abuses and life in Australia; The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), its hero Erasmus' father, condemned, like Reade himself, to celibacy; Hard Cash (1863), against private lunatic asylums; Griffith Gaunt, or Jealousy (1866); Foul Play (1869), in conjunction with Dion Boucicault, against ship-knackers; Put Yourself in his Place (1870), against trades-unions; A Terrible Temptation (1871); and A Woman-hater (1877), for woman's rights. His last years clouded by sorrow and ill-health, he died at Shepherd's Bush on Good Friday, 11th April 1884, and was buried in Willesden churchyard beside his 'beloved friend.'
Charles Reade was not one of the greatest novelists of the century (who number three, at most four); but of the second order he is perhaps the best. He is sometimes coarse, theatrical sometimes rather than dramatic, and sometimes even dull, weighed down with authorities—the blue-books, books of travel, and the like, with which he fettered his imagination. With the greatest novelists one is conscious only of the story, with him one is always conscious of the story-teller; some tone or mannerism from time to time jars upon us. And yet what a story-teller it is. How he carries us with him, stirs us, saddens, gladdens, terrifies, delights. No novels are better than his to read aloud. For they hold the listeners spell-bound, and 'Bravo!' or oftener just a long-drawn 'Oh!' attests Reade's magnificent powers far better than can all the fine-spun criticisms in which A. concedes and B. denies him the gifts of humour and pathos; in which M. declares that 'Reade invented the True Woman,' and N. that 'of the woman who is essentially of our time he has never had even the faintest conception;' in which X. discovers 'in the short Wandering Heir at least half a dozen situations all new and all strong,' and Y. pronounces it 'very decidedly the worst of Reade's shorter stories.' These things need not perplex us, the simple admirers of Griffith Gaunt, of the fight with the pirates, of the bursting of the reservoir, and of the scenes at the gold-diggings. At the same time we may rejoice in the unanimous verdict that is passed by the critics on The Cloister and the Hearth. It Mr Swinburne—from whom praise is praise indeed—places 'among the very greatest masterpieces of narrative. 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.'
Charles Reade: A Memoir (2 vols. 1887), by his brother and a nephew, is a most unhappy piece of biography. The Gentleman's Magazine for 1882 contains two articles by Sir W. Besant and 'Ouida;' and in his Miscellanies (1886) is Mr Swinburne's article from the Nineteenth Century. Readiana (1882) is a collection of the novelist's fragments; and Extracts from his works, with an introduction by Mrs Ireland, appeared in 1891.