(1814–84). The English novelist and playwright Charles Reade was a contemporary of Charles Dickens. Like Dickens, he often wrote of the social evils of the time. Reade’s best-known work, however, is a historical novel, The Cloister and the Hearth. Published in 1861, it tells the story of the father of the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus.
Charles Reade was born on June 8, 1814, in Oxfordshire, England. The son of a squire, he attended local private schools and then went to Oxford University’s Magdalen College. In 1835 he was awarded a fellowship at the college that brought him a small income for the rest of his life. Although this forced him to maintain ties with Magdalen, which he disliked, he lived mainly in London.
Reade’s first success as a writer did not come until 1851, when a French play he translated was staged in London. Other plays soon followed, among them Masks and Faces (1852), which he turned into the novel Peg Woffington. While Reade continued to write plays, novels occupied more and more of his attention. He published the historical novel Griffith Gaunt in 1866. Among his books on social abuses are It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), which attacks prison conditions, and Hard Cash (1863), an exposé of insane asylums. In an effort to make his books true to life, Reade collected vast files of information from newspapers and other factual sources. His work, however, is marred by melodramatic elements. He died on April 11, 1884, in London.