He wrote on May 30, 1862, "As for writing a short story on the spur, it is a thing I never could do in my life. My success in literature is owing to my throwing my whole soul into the one thing I am doing. And at present I am over head and ears in the story for Dickens" ("Very Hard Cash"). "Write to me often. The grand mistake of friends at a distance is not corresponding frequently enough. Thus the threads of business are broken, as well as the silken threads of sentiment. Thanks about the drama" ("It is Never Too Late to Mend"). "I have but faint hopes. It is the best thing I ever wrote of any kind, and therefore I fear no manager will ever have brains to take it."
On June 20, 1862, he wrote of his forthcoming story, "Between ourselves, the story" ("Very Hard Cash") "will be worth as many thousands as I have asked hundreds. I suppose they think I am an idiot, or else that I have no idea of the value of my works in the United States. I put 6 Bolton Row" (the usual address on his letters) "because that is the safest address for you to write to; but in reality I have been for the last month, and still am, buried in Oxford, working hard upon the story. My advice to you is to enter into no literary speculations during this frightful war. Upon its conclusion, by working in concert, we might do something considerable together."
On August 5, 1862, he wrote from Magdalen College, where he was to remain until the 1st of October, "I shall be truly thankful if you postpone your venture till peace is re-established. I am quite sure that a new weekly started now would inevitably fail. You could not print the war as Leslie and Harper do, and who cares for the still small voice of literature and fiction amongst the braying of trumpets and the roll of drums? Do the right thing at the right time, my boy: that is how hits are made. If you will postpone till a convenient season, I will work with you and will hold myself free of all engagements in order to do so. I am myself accumulating subjects with a similar view, and we might do something more than a serial story, though a serial story must always be the mainspring of success."
He wrote on September 6, 1862, "I am glad you have varied your project by purchasing an established monthly" ("The Knickerbocker Magazine") "instead of starting a new weekly. I will form no new engagements nor promise early sheets without first consulting you. I will look out for you, and as soon as my large story is completed will try if I cannot do something for you myself."
On the 29th of June, 1863, he wrote, "I am much pleased with your 'Knickerbocker Magazine,' and cannot too much admire your energy and versatility. Take notice, I recommended you Miss Braddon's works while they were to be had for a song. 'Lost and Saved,' by Mrs. Norton, will make you a good deal of money if you venture boldly on it and publish it. It is out-and-out the best new thing, and rather American. If you hear of any scrap-books containing copious extracts from American papers, I am open to purchase at a fair price, especially if the extracts are miscellaneous and dated, and, above all, if classified. I shall, also be grateful if you will tell me whether there is not a journal that reports trials, and send me a specimen. Command me whenever you think I can be of an atom of use to you."
Charles Reade's letters were always highly characteristic of him. In these he mentally photographed himself, for he always wrote with candid unreserve, whether to friend or foe, and he liked to talk with the pen. Both by nature and education he was fitted for a quiet, studious, scholarly life, and with pen and paper and books he was always at home. He liked, too, at intervals the cloister-like life he led at Magdalen College. With nothing to disturb him in his studies and his work, with glimpses of bright green turf and umbrageous recesses and gray old buildings with oriel windows that were there before England saw the Wars of the Roses, his environment was picturesque, and his bursar's cap and gown became him well, yet seemed to remove him still further from the busy world and suggest some ecclesiastical figure of the fifteenth century. He was a D.C.L., and known as Dr. Reade in the college, just as if he had never written a novel or a play and had been untrumpeted by fame.
There, in his rooms on "Staircase No. 2," with "Dr. Reade" over the door, he labored con amore. Indeed, he was amid more congenial surroundings and more truly in his element in the atmosphere of the ancient university than in London or anywhere else. By both nature and habit he was more fitted to enjoy the cloister than the hearth, although he by no means undervalued the pleasures of society and domestic life. The children of his brain—his own works—seemed to be the only ones he cared for; and, loving and feeling proud of his literary family, he was mentally satisfied. Yet no man was a keener observer of home-life, and his portraiture of women and analysis of female character, although unvarying as to types, were singularly true and penetrating. His Fellowship was the principal cause of his never marrying, the next most important one being that he was always wedded to his pen; and literature, like law, is a jealous mistress. He had some idea of this kind when he said, "An author married is an author marred,"—an adaptation from Shakespeare, who was ungallant enough to say, "A young man married is a man that's marred." But a good and suitable wife would have given éclat to his social life.
His splendid courage and the manliness of his character always commanded admiration, and his hatred of injustice and wrong, cant and hypocrisy, was in harmony with the nobility and passionate earnestness of his nature. He was the friend of the workingman, the poor, and the oppressed; and he exposed the abuses of jails and lunatic-asylums and trades-unions, and much besides, in the interest of humanity and as a disinterested philanthropist. He fought, too, the battles of his fellow-authors on the copyright questions with the same tremendous energy that he displayed in his struggles for practical reform in other directions; and as a practical reformer through his novels he, like Dickens, accomplished a great deal of good. When moved by strong impulses in this direction, he seemed indeed to write with a quivering pen, dipped not in ink, but in fire and gall and blood, and to imbue what he wrote with his own vital force and magnetic spirit.
Measuring his literary stature at a glance, it must, however, be admitted that, notwithstanding his high average of excellence, he was a very uneven writer, and hence between his worst and his best work there is a wide distance in point of merit. But the best of his writings as well deserves immortality as anything ever penned in fiction. Although inferior to them in some respects, he was superior in epigrammatic descriptive power to the most famous of his English and French contemporaries, and particularly in his descriptions of what he had never seen or experienced, but only read about. Take, for instance, his Australian scenes in "It is Never Too Late to Mend," where the effect of the song of the English skylark in the gold-diggings is told with touching brevity and pathos. Yet all his information concerning Australia had been gained by reading newspaper correspondence and books on that country. He made no secret of this, and said in substance, as frankly as he spoke of his scrap-books, "I read these to save me from the usual trick of describing a bit of England and calling it the antipodes." He could infuse life into the dry figures of a blue-book; but in the mere portraiture of ordinary conventional society manners, free from the sway of strong passions and emotions, he did not greatly excel writers of far inferior ability. He had the graphic simplicity and realism of De Foe in describing places he had never seen; and as the historian of a country or a period in which he felt interested he would have been unusually brilliant, for he was an adept in picturesque condensation, and knew how to improve upon his originals and use them without copying a word. He was a master of vigorous English.
Kinahan Cornwallis.