Accounting for Taste:Very Hard Cash and Middle-Class Readership Sean Grass (bio) Charles Reade was laboring over a late installment of Very Hard Cash in August 1863 when he was visited by Charles Dickens's sub-editor W. H. Wills, who brought from Dickens a pointed and presumably unwelcome suggestion: begin winding the novel to a close. Very Hard Cash had been All the Year Round's lead serial since March.1 But in August, Reade was only just beginning to work the plot toward its sensational crisis, protagonist Alfred Hardie's daring escape amid a terrible fire from the insane asylum into which his conniving father had placed him. Dickens had negotiated hard for Reade's novel, relying on his personal charm, All the Year Round's wide circulation, and his own standing as a novelist to bring Reade into the fold. Wilkie Collins had recently defected to the Cornhill, lured there by the princely sum of £5,000 for Armadale.2 Reade was no Collins, but he had won a substantial following with his exposé of prison abuses in It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), then expanded his readership with the medieval romance The Cloister and the Hearth (1861). Though they differed in subject, both novels relied upon Reade's "great system" for accumulating documentary facts and placing them in the service of bloated plots.3 In negotiating with Reade, Dickens gave him the £800 he asked for the serial, but he stipulated that Reade would not be compensated if he went beyond the prescribed limits of time and space.4 But even this did not keep Reade from making Very Hard Cash into an unwieldy narrative sprawl featuring Oxford boat races, lovers' sighs, pirates, a hurricane, a shipwreck, the railway bubble, lunacy laws, and the abuse of asylum inmates. Reade crammed all of these into a plot that traces the titular "hard cash" from Calcutta to England in the pocketbook of merchant ship captain David Dodd, who survives numerous exotic perils only to be robbed in England by Richard Hardie, an insolvent banker who institutionalizes his own son to conceal his frauds. Despite these thrills, [End Page 464] Wills told Reade, All the Year Round had lost 3,000 readers since March.5 It was high time to end the novel. But Very Hard Cash was not to be wound down so easily. It ran for seventeen more weeks, finally concluding on December 26. "This meant that Wills and Dickens had 115 pages for nothing," John Sutherland observes, a "gift" they could probably have done without.6 Reade plunged the plucky Alfred into one asylum, then another and another, before allowing him to escape via the providential fire. He killed off Alfred's sister by having one of Richard Hardie's many financial victims bludgeon her to death. He sent David Dodd to sea again, amnesiac and under another name, where he recovers his memory after nearly drowning and returns to England just in time to claim his £14,000. And he waged a furious battle against the injustices of Victorian lunacy laws, depicting at length the legal chicanery by which villains might conspire with doctors to lock up sane persons who were then abused at the hands of brutal warders. By October, one exasperated asylum proprietor, Dr. J. S. Bushnan of Laverstock House Asylum, had had enough, complaining to the Daily News of "the terrible slander" that Reade's novel was casting upon a respectable body of professional men.7 By November, Dickens had apparently had enough too. On November 22 he instructed Wills to insert a note after Reade's final installment, in capital letters and crossing both columns, stating that while the contents of All the Year Round ought generally "to be received as the statements and opinions of its conductor," this was not so with works of fiction.8 "When one of my literary brothers does me the honour to undertake such a task," Dickens declared, "I hold that he executes it on his own personal responsibility, and for the sustainment of his own reputation."9 Very Hard Cash's slender purchase on a twenty-first-century afterlife rests to...
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Mar 1, 2020
Agnes Arnold‐Forster 
