THE LARK IN THE GOLD-FIELDS. CHARLES READE.

Charles Reade, the youngest of eleven children of John Reade, an English country squire, was horn in Ipsden in 1814. His father and mother loved him dearly, but found it convenient, after the custom of the time, to intrust his early instruction and care to tutors and masters of boarding schools. Thus the memory of frequent floggings survived in the boy’s mind, as marking the thorny road of his first school days.

He entered Magdalen College in 1831 and three years later was appointed to a fellowship which he held for fifty years, until his death in 1884. The income of this enabled him to strive for many years against disappointments and finally achieve fame as a writer. He toiled long and hard for recognition and it was not until he was nearly forty years of age that he became known.

In the meantime he had studied law and had written many plays which he had vainly tried to have accepted.

His first successful work of note was the brilliant comedy, “Masks and Faces.” This he turned later into the novel, “Peg Woffington.” His stories are throughout strong in dramatic situations and, despite his greater success as a novelist, he always considered himself primarily a playwright.

Like his friend Charles Dickens, he aimed in his writings to correct social abuses, and his literary lance was ever couched to aid the unfortunate.

He wrote “It’s Never too Late to Mend” to abolish the evils of the English prison system. Its success was tremendous, and later, when it was dramatized and produced at the Princess Theater, there was almost a riot in the audience.

“Hard Cash” was directed against the abuses in insane asylums; “Foul Play” dealt with those connected with the merchant shipping service; “Put Yourself in His Place” took up the hardships of the laboring man. Thus in his books he assailed the evils of his time.

First and always, however, he was a literary artist. He knew how to weave together hard, homely facts and romantic incidents so that his blows for right struck all the harder because of the reader’s absorbing interest in the plot of his story. “It would require a chemical analysis to separate the fiction from the reality,” said Justin McCarthy of Reade’s novels.

“The Cloister and the Hearth” is considered his greatest story.