Upon beginning Charles Reade’s sequel to his novel Love Me Little, Love Me Long (1850), a reader might believe the book is purely romance. Mrs. Dodd and her children, Edward and Julia, keep one another company in the absence of David Dodd, a seaman who is in India. The three seem not only a close family but also close friends. They prepare for Edward to enroll at Oxford, Julia feeling jealous not to be able to continue her education in the same manner, while Mrs. Dodd worries over their use of slang, her concerns helping produce a lighthearted tone.

That tone continues as Mrs. Dodd and Julia travel to Oxford to watch Edward compete in a rowing contest and encounter Edward’s new schoolmates. One of the young men, Alfred Hardie, falls in love with Julia, their romance develops, and he asks Mrs. Dodd for Julia’s hand. In another plot aspect, Julia is treated for a mysterious illness, allowing Reade to confront the restrictions placed on women in his society. Julia requests to see a “doctress” or a “she-doctor,” to which her mother responds, “There is no such thing. No; assurance is becoming a characteristic of our sex; but we have not yet intruded ourselves into the learned professions, thank Heaven!” Reade also ironically foreshadows the family’s later battle with just such “learned” professionals who decidedly act against the better good of their so-called patients.

Because Mr. Dodd remains absent, Mrs. Dodd dutifully suggests that Alfred write to his own father, the banker Richard Hardie, to ask his permission for the marriage. At this point, the novel’s tone darkens, as Hardie responds with a decided no, thanking Mrs. Dodd for her “delicacy,” but informing her “this match is out of the question.” The young people are heartbroken, and Alfred is perplexed, as he cannot persuade his father to explain why he is against the marriage. When Mrs. Dodd awakens in the middle of the night, crying out for her husband, Reade foreshadows a far more sober emotional awakening in the Dodds’s future.

As the action rises, the Dodd family learns that Richard Hardie has swindled David Dodd out of his family’s support, the “hard cash” he worked diligently to earn. Driven to distraction by the loss, Dodd is confined to a private mental institution, with the persuasion of authorities by Hardie. His surname well earned, Hardie goes so far as to commit his own son, Alfred, to the same institution, to ensure that Alfred will not reveal the secret he discovers of his father’s theft. While the situation eventually works out well, the horrors of the institution are revealed, including physical and emotional abuses of the patients. Alfred remains sedated much of the time to prevent any protest, the presumed treatments only exacerbate most patients’ problems, and Dodd cannot make anyone listen to his explanations. The appointed attorneys are even less help, not taking any of the patients’ pleas seriously. Eventually, Dodd escapes and is able to return to the sea, and Alfred is aided by sympathetic attendants and rescued by the persistent Edward and other supporters, with Richard Hardie exposed.

Reade intended his novel to alert the public to the abuse of mental patients, one of his many social causes. Just as interesting as the novel are the letters it generated, printed in later editions. Reade comments in a preface that his book does represent a “matter-of-fact romance; that is, a fiction built on truths,” which he gathered from many sources, including firsthand interviews. However, the authenticity of the facts of abuse were questioned. As Reade writes, “The madhouse scenes have been picked out by certain disinterested gentlemen who keep private asylums” who indulged in “a little easy cant about Sensation Novelists.” That particular correspondence to the editor of the Daily News, signed by J. S. Bushnan, M.D., of Laverstock House Asylum, Salisbury, hints at Reade’s “terrible slander” of a group of professionals of which he is proud to be a part. Bushnan challenges Reade to “quote his case, and openly and fearlessly declare when and where such atrocities occurred.” Reade provides just such details in a chilling relation of not only facts he researched but also of information gleaned from his own recent challenge. With the help of the press, Reade gained release of a sane man “falsely imprisoned,” housing and supporting that man during his legal appeals, in which a “functionary . . . did all he could to defeat justice, and break the poor suitor’s back and perpetuate the stigma.” He quotes another case, “Mathew v. Harty,” that furnished details for his novel. Additional gruesome information regarding physical abuse of a specific patient leading to his death concludes with Reade’s comments as to the shocking situation that “brute force and traditional cunning” is used against those of “weak understanding.” More shocking is “that they should be so often massacred, so seldom avenged.”

Hard Cash retains its interest for 21st-century readers as an example of well-written protest fiction, in its day ranked with the best of Charles Dickens’s “novels with a purpose.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reade, Charles. Preface to The Complete Works of Charles Reade: Hard Cash. New York: Kelmscott Society, n.d.
“Correspondence Elicited by the First Edition of ‘Hard Cash.’” The Complete Works of Charles Reade: Hard Cash. New York: Kelmscott Society, n.d.