Charles Reade E-Book

E. W. Hornung

• Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

In "Charles Reade," E. W. Hornung embarks on an intricate exploration of the life and works of the Victorian novelist and playwright Charles Reade. Delving into Reade's literary oeuvre, Hornung employs a narrative style that blends biographical analysis with critical examination, illuminating the themes of social justice and reform prevalent in Reade's writings. With a keen eye for detail, Hornung navigates the complex landscape of 19th-century literature, situating Reade within the broader context of his contemporaries while also highlighting the unique qualities that set him apart. E. W. Hornung, renowned for his contributions to literature as both a writer and critic, draws upon his deep understanding of Victorian culture to offer insights that reflect his own literary sensibility. Hornung's background and experiences in the literary circles of the time provide a profound context for his examination of Reade, allowing him to weave personal anecdotes and historical references into his narrative. This makes the biography not only informative but deeply engaging, as it resonates with the cultural milieu of the era. For readers interested in the intersections of literature and social critique, "Charles Reade" is a compelling read that invites appreciation of both the author and the social issues he navigated through his work. Hornung'Äôs meticulous research and passionate prose make this book an essential addition to any literary scholar'Äôs library, as it sheds light on the often-overlooked contributions of Reade to English literature.

Leseprobe

E. W. Hornung

Charles Reade

Published by Good Press, 2022

[email protected]

EAN 4066338077356

Table of Contents

Cover

Titlepage

Text

CHARLES READE was the youngest son of a country gentleman, one of the Reades of Ipsden, in Oxfordshire, where he was born twelve months before Waterloo. His schooling was private and ferocious; but at seventeen, thanks to an English Essay well above the average, he gained a Demyship at Magdalen, and four years later was elected a Fellow of the college. From that moment he considered himself condemned to perpetual celibacy, and observed the letter of an oppressive law inflexibly; yet the other celibates did not altogether approve of him.

In truth there never can have been a Don less donnish, or one less in sympathy with the accepted type. Did he not depict himself, in A Terrible Temptation, as “looking like a great fat country farmer” and “walking like a sailor”? Had not his colleagues of the high-table “some of the thickest skulls I have ever encountered”? Not that he saw much of them, unless it was in the year 1851, when Charles Reade was Vice-President of Magdalen. Thereafter his chief use for Oxford was to go down and shut himself up in his rooms to write his book or ransack the Bodleian for the facts on which his books were built. In earlier days he would absent himself altogether on alien enterprises, some of them the reverse of academic. He was called to the Bar, but did not appear in court; he had fought a Publisher and lost, though represented by distinguished counsel; then he characteristically conducted a second case himself, won it, but was disallowed his costs. Medicine he tried at Edinburgh, but abandoned upon fainting in the dissecting-room; the Church was considered, though less favourably, under strong domestic pressure. There are traces of all three phases in Reade’s novels; most of them contain a lawyer, a doctor, and an ecclesiastic, all drawn with some inside knowledge of their respective jobs.

But it was not only with the learned professions that this fickle Fellow flirted; the six hundred a year his college paid him left a margin for financial ventures as incongruous as they were surreptitious. At one time he was in business partnership with a French fiddle-dealer in the purlieus of Soho, and at another with an Edinburgh fishwife in a fleet of herring-boats. Both ventures were rooted in romance. All his days Reade was a virtuoso in the violin—a fair performer, but a great connoisseur—and his erudite but fascinating articles on Cremona fiddles, his speciality, are worth all the money he can have dropped on the craze. As for the fishwife, she is still deliciously alive as the canny heroine of Christie Johnstone, possibly the best Scotch story ever written by an Englishman. Reade’s women are too often either shrews or sheep, if not both in turn, but this comely creature trips off his pen as she came into his early life, unencumbered by the knowing generalities bestowed upon so many of her successors.

Not that Christie Johnstone was a first novel; it had been preceded by Peg Woffington, but only by a matter of months, so that we may look upon the pair as heading the procession of Reade’s books in double harness. They had everything in common except a theme: both were one-volume novels, written with extraordinary freshness and dramatic vigour, albeit with certain dubious eccentricities of style. Peg Woffington suffers from being the narrative version of a more famous comedy, Masks and Faces, in which Reade had the skilled assistance of Tom Taylor. The best scenes depend on stage effects, fall flat without them; but the characters of Triplet and of Peg, Pomander and the Vanes, are lightly and strongly drawn, while as a minor gem Colley Cibber is possibly no loser by the book. Here, at any rate, was a new novelist with whom the world of letters would have to reckon. Yet the two books had no successors for some years, and they were years that might have daunted a less valiant spirit, for it was over these books that Reade took the law of Bentley, with results already given, and on balance a loss to the author of £150. He was now nearly forty, and it seemed still uncertain that he would settle down even to literature. But with all his vagaries he had been for years preparing himself, on a system all his own, for the pursuit he had at last taken up. “I studied the great art of Fiction closely,” he declares, “for fifteen years before I wrote a line.” But he had written at least fifteen plays, most of which remained, and still remain, unacted. One of them, however, a topical melodrama on the then alluring subject of the Australian diggings, eventually enjoyed a short run at Drury Lane under the auspicious name of Gold.

In the first act of Gold the leading character, an habitual criminal, is taken up for picking pockets; transported to Australia, he reappears in worthier case, to work out his moral and pecuniary salvation in some thrilling scenes before the finish. As first mentioned in a spasmodic diary, the piece was to be “a great original play” and “make a great hit”; but long before its acceptance, encouraged, no doubt, by the literary success of Peg Woffington, Reade was busy turning Gold also into a novel. His plan was to split up his melodrama into a mere frame for a terrific picture of prison life in England at that time—the new inspiration sprang from “a noble passage in the Times of September 7th or 8th, 1853”—and he went to work with grim gusto on lines long since laid down, but hardly tested hitherto.