READE, CHARLES , English novelist and dramatist, the son of an Oxfordshire squire, was born at Ipsden, Oxfordshire, on June 8, 1814. He entered Magdalen college, Oxford, proceeded B.A. in 1835, and became a fellow of his college. He was subsequently dean of arts, and vice-president of Magdalen college, taking his degree of D.C.L. in 1847. His name was entered at Lincoln's Inn in 1836; he was elected Vinerian fellow in 1842, and was called to the bar in 1843. He kept his fellowship at Magdalen all his life, but after taking his degree he spent the greater part of his time in London. He began his literary career as a dramatist, and it was his own wish that the word "dramatist" should stand first in the description of his occupations on his tombstone. He was dramatist first and novelist afterwards, not merely chronologically but in his aims as an author, always having an eye to stage-effect in scene and situation as well as in dialogue.
His first comedy, The Ladies' Battle, appeared at the Olympic Theatre in May 1851. It was followed by Angelo (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. It was produced in Nov. 1852, and later was expanded into three acts. By the advice of the actress, Laura Seymour, he turned the play into a prose story which appeared in 1853 as Peg Woffington as did also Christie Johnstone, a close study of Scottish fisher folk. In 1854 he produced, 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. In the next year appeared Art, afterwards known as Nance Old field.
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. 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 (186o), drama tized as The Double Marriage. Then appeared in 1861, his mas terpiece, The Cloister and the Hearth, relating the adventures of the father of Erasmus; it is undoubtedly 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 strove to direct attention to the abuses of private lunatic asylums. Three other novels "with a purpose" were Foul Play (1869), in which he exposed the iniquities of ship-knackers, and paved the way for the labours of Samuel Plimsoll; Put Yourself in his Place (187o), in which he grappled with the trades-unions; and A Woman-Hater (1877), on the degrading conditions of village life. The Wander ing Heir (1875), of which he also wrote a version for the stage, was suggested by the Tichborne trial.
Outside the line of these moral and occasional works Reade 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 the best of his novels. His greatest success as a dramatist attended his last attempt Drink—an adaptation of Zola's L'Assommoir, produced in 1879. In that year his friend Laura Seymour, who had kept house for him since 1854, died. Reade's health failed from that time, and he died on April II, 1884, leaving behind him a completed novel, A Perilous Secret, which showed no falling off in 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. By his will he left his workshop and his accumu lation of materials open for inspection for two years after his death. He had collected an enormous mass of materials for his study of human nature, from personal observation, from news papers, books of travel, blue-books of commissions of inquiry, from miscellaneous reading. This vast documentation, and Reade's use of it, shows him as a precursor of the school of Zola.
See Charles L. Reade and Compton Reade, Charles Reade, a Memoir (2 vols., 1887) ; A. C. Swinburne, Miscellanies (i886) ; John Coleman, Charles Reade as I knew him (19°3) ; Walter C. Phillips, Dickens, Reade and Collins, Sensation Novelists (1919).