Those who study Reade can have no difficulty in detecting the cause of his failure in the drama. He is fertile of incident, but he has not the art of selecting a few striking scenes rising out of one another and leading rapidly up to a catastrophe. His copiousness finds room in the freer field of prose fiction, and his want of skill in selection is less noticeable there. Accordingly he soon won as a novelist the popularity he never secured as a playwright. _Christie Johnstone_ (1853), one of his best stories, was the successor of _Peg Woffington_, and after _It is Never Too Late to Mend_ (1856) he took his place as one of the first writers of fiction of the time. Charles Reade was a man of strong individuality, intense in all his opinions, and bent on making them known. Hence he gives us perhaps the best examples of the novel with a purpose. Dickens had done much work of this description, but Reade went beyond him. Many of his novels are devoted to special questions. Thus _It is Never Too Late to Mend_ deals with prison administration, _Hard Cash_ with lunatic asylums, and _Put Yourself in his Place_ with trade-unions. Moreover, Reade was by no means the man to approach these questions with a few _a priori_ impressions only in his head. He was thorough, and he made an elaborate study of each before he wrote about it. Every incident reported in the newspapers, every trial in the courts of law, every fact wherever recorded, he made it his business to master. He cared less for theories, at least for the theories of other people: he made his own, and loved them. But his survey of the evidence was as nearly exhaustive as it could be. No other writer of fiction ever left such an apparatus of note-books, newspaper cuttings, etc., all digested and systematically arranged. It has been commonly held that Reade's work was injured by this laborious method; and no doubt the opinion is in part sound. Yet his merits as well as his defects are closely related to his method. His variety and his inexhaustible resource are due to the enormous accumulation of his facts. He loved to illustrate the saying that truth is stranger than fiction, and he held that no man's invention could supply incidents equal to those which patient investigation would reveal. There is no novelist with respect to whom it is so dangerous to say, 'this is unnatural or impossible.' Probably the seeming impossibility is a hard fact, disclosed by some forgotten trial or recorded in some old newspaper.