The Works of Charles Reade, Vol. 2 Illustrated with One Hundred and Twelve Full-Page Wood Engravings, Hard Cash, Love Me Little, Love Me Long (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Works of Charles Reade, Vol. 2: Illustrated With One Hundred and Twelve Full-Page Wood Engravings, Hard Cash, Love Me Little, Love Me Long "Hard Cash," like "The Cloister and the Hearth," is a matter-of-fact romance; that is, a fiction built on truths; and these truths have been gathered by long, severe, systematic labor, from a multitude of volumes, pamphlets, journals, reports, blue-books, manuscript narratives, letters, and living people, whom I have sought out, examined, and cross-examined to get at the truth on each main topic I have striven to handle. The madhouse scenes have been picked out by certain disinterested gentlemen who keep private asylums, and periodicals to puff them; and have been met with bold denials of public facts and with timid personalities, and a little easy cant about sensation novelists; but in reality those passages have been written on the same system as the nautical, legal, and other scenes: the best evidence has been ransacked; and a large portion of this evidence I shall be happy to show at my house to any brother writer who is disinterested, and really cares enough for truth and humanity to walk or ride a mile in pursuit of them. Sir - When a writer of sensation romances makes a heroine push a superfluous husband into a well, or set a house on fire in order to get rid of disagreeable testimony, we smile over the highly seasoned dish, but do not think it necessary to apply the warning to ourselves, and for the future avoid sitting on the edge of a draw-well, or having any but fire-proof libraries. But when we read, as in the novel "Very Hard Cash," now publishing in All the Year Round, that any man may, at any moment, be consigned to a fate which to a sane man would be worse than death, and that not by the single act of any of our Lady Audleys, or other interesting criminals, but as part of a regular organized system, in all compliance with the laws of the land - when we read this, a thrill of terror goes through the public mind. If what Mr. Charles Reade says be possible, who is safe? Allow me, as one thoroughly conversant with the working of the law of lunacy, to reassure the minds of your readers by informing them that it is not possible. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.