Cloister and the Hearth — Charles Reader

THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH - Charles Reade - Abridged, with Introduction and Notes - 1929. - CONTENTS CHAPTER I. - CHAPTER 11. - CHAPTER 111. - CHAPTER IV. - C H A P T V . - CHAPTER VI. - CHAPTER VII. - CHAPTER VIII. - CHAPTER IX. - CHAPTER X. - CHAPTER XI. - CHAPTER XII. - CHAPTER XIII. - CHAPTER XIV. - CHAPTER XV. - CHAPTER XVI. - CHAPTER XVII. CHAPTER XVIII. CHAPTER XIX. - CHAPTER XX. - CHAPTER XXI. CHAPTER XXII. - - - m - . - - - - - - . - - - - - m - - - - - - - . - - m - - . . - - - - - . - - - - - - . S - - - - - - . - - - - - . m - - - - - . - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - . - - m - - - . - - - - - - - - - - - m - - - - - . . - - - - - - - - m - - - - - - vii PAQB X1 xiii ... vm THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH CHAPTER XXIII. CHAPTERX XIV. CHAPTERX XV. CHAPTERX XVI. CHAPTERX XVII. CHAPTER XXVIII. CHAPTERX XIX. CHAPTERX XX. CHAPTERX XXI. CHAPTER XXXII. CHAPTERX XXIII. CHAPTERX XXIV. CHAPTERX XXV. C H A P T X XXVI. NOTES - - - PAQE 115 120 121 127 130 136 140 143 147 152 160 165 171 174 SUBJECTS B OR SHORTE SSAYS - - - - - 183 HELPS TO FURTHE S R TU DY - - - - - - 184 ILLUSTRATIONS DESIDERIUSE RASMUSb, y A. DWER - - - Frontispiece The light at the nape of his neck made a glow-PAGE wormofhim - - - - - - 41 Martin drew the bolt very slowly, and in rushed Dierich and four more - - - - - 49 The text of this edition has been reduced by omissions, but is otherwise faithful to the original. The illustrations are reproductions of drawings made by Charles Keene for the first version of the story when it appeared in Once a Week. - INTRODUCTION - The Cbister and the Hearth is one of the most famous stories produced in an age of great story-tellers. Charles Reade was a contemporary of Thackeray and Dickens, Kingsley and George Eliot, novelists whose works are more justly renowned than any of his own, with one exception. Of this one Swinburne, a poet and critic of the next generation, said, A story better conceived or better composed, better constructed or better related, than The Cloister and the Hearth it would be mcult to h d anywhere. And on the merit of this story he ranks him high among the novelists. Reade had the gifts and the experience we should expect to find in the writer of such a novel. He was a scholar, a wide and u n t i i g reader he was a lawyer by profession and therefore a keen observer of human nature a musician, with an artists sympathy and imagination and a dramatist, with training and skiU in the construction of a plot. The novelists of his time had nearly always a motive behind their tales they were trying to rouse the sympathy of their readers to attack Lome social evil. When Kingsley wrote The Water-Babies, he was revealing the horrors of the life of a child chimney-sweq p. Dickem condemned the schools of the day in Nicholas Nickleby, and the evils of workhouses in 02iver Twist. Reade himself wrote It is Never Too Late to Mend to stir up indignation against the prisons of the time. We can sometimes feel his caustic criticism behind the incidents in The Cloister and the Hearth, his scorn of hypocrisy, fraud and superstition, his rage against the tyranny of great rulers. But he did not write this novel with the motive of reform. He wrote it because he waa keenly interested in the life of the Renaissance and because he had found a story he loved. The story was intensely real to him, and therefore it grips us too...