Hard Cash: A Matter-of-Fact Romance was published by Sampson Low in 1863, after serialization in Dickens’s All the Year Round, and it was Reade’s most explosive novel of social reform. The “hard cash” of the title is a sum of money that the dishonest banker Richard Hardie has stolen, and his scheme to conceal the theft leads him to have his own son Alfred committed to a private lunatic asylum — a perfectly sane young man declared insane by corrupt doctors and imprisoned without legal recourse.
Reade’s account of Alfred’s incarceration is based on extensive research into the conditions of Victorian asylums and the legal mechanisms by which sane people could be committed. The novel documents the ease with which two doctors’ signatures could deprive a person of liberty, the difficulty of securing release once committed, and the brutality of asylum life — straitjackets, forced drugging, and physical violence administered by untrained attendants. These scenes are among the most harrowing in Victorian fiction, and they were effective as polemic: the novel contributed to public pressure for reform of the lunacy laws.
The subtitle “A Matter-of-Fact Romance” is characteristically Reade: he insists that his sensational plot is grounded in documented fact, and he footnotes his fiction with references to parliamentary reports, newspaper accounts, and official inquiries. The combination of melodramatic plotting and documentary evidence was Reade’s signature method, and in Hard Cash it works at its most powerful.
Collecting Hard Cash
First edition (Sampson Low, London, 1863): Three volumes, cloth.
Market values:
- First edition, three volumes: $150–$400
- Single-volume editions: $15–$35