Charles Reade

Charles Reade (1814–1884) was an English novelist and dramatist, a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, for most of his life, who wrote plays with Tom Taylor before turning to fiction with a campaigning purpose. It Is Never Too Late to Mend attacked prison discipline, Hard Cash the private lunatic asylums and A Terrible Temptation both, while The Cloister and the Hearth, his historical novel of the fifteenth century, is usually counted his best. He worked from huge scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings and defended every disputed fact in print, and he fought his critics with relish. For many years he lived with the actress Laura Seymour, whom he never married.