Charles Reade

Charles Reade (1814–1884) was born in Ipsden, Oxfordshire, and held a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford for most of his life even while writing prolifically for the stage and, from the 1850s, fiction. His novels combined stage melodrama with an unusually thorough documentary research method, most famously in The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), a historical novel following the father of Erasmus through fifteenth-century Europe, built from years spent researching medieval life and manners; he also wrote social-protest novels attacking abuses in Victorian prisons and asylums. He died in London at seventy.