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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: RAY-RHU |
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READE, CHARLES (1814-1884) , English novelist and dramatist, the son of an Oxfordshire squire, was born at Ipsden, Oxfordshire, on the 8th of June 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
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. He described prison life with a fidelity which becomes at times tedious and revolting; but the power of the descriptions was undeniable, and the interest
quick
village
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 (1893). The first of these was in his own opinion the best of his novels, and his own opinion was probably right. He was wrong, however, in his own conception of his powers as a dramatist. At intervals throughout his literary career he sought to gratify his dramatic ambition, hiring a theatre and engaging a company for the representation of his own plays. An example of his persistency was seen in the case of Foul Play. He wrote this in 1869 in combination with Mr Dion
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. He spoke about his method in his prefaces; he introduced himself into one of his novels" Dr Rolfe " in A Terrible Temptation; and by his will he left his workshop and his accumulation 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 newspapers
store of incidents and suggestions. A collector of the kind was bound to be systematic, otherwise his collection would have fallen into confusion, and Reade's collection contains many curiosities in classification and tabulation. On the value of this method for his art there has been much discussion, the prevalent opinion being that his imagination was overwhelmed and stifled by it. He himself maintained the contrary; and it must be admitted that a priori critics have not rightly understood the use that he made of his laboriously collected facts. He did not merely shovel the contents of his notebooks into his novels; they served rather as an atmosphere of reality in which he worked, so that his novels were like pictures painted in the open air. His imagination worked freely among them and was quickened rather than impeded by their suggestions of things suited to the purpose in hand; and it is probably to his close and constant contact with facts, acting on an imagination naturally fertile, that we owe his marvellous abundance of incident. Even in his novels of character there is no meditative and analytic stagnation; the development of character is shown through a rapid unceasing progression of significant facts. This rapidity of movement
See Charles L. Reade and Compton Reade, Charles Reade, a Memoir (2 vols., 1887); A. C. Swinburne, Miscellanies (1886) ; and some recollections by John Coleman, Charles Reade as I knew him (1903). End of Article: READE, CHARLES (1814-1884) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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