Critical reception of Charles Reade's fiction in Great Britain and the USA

Abstract

The current paper examines the critical reception of literary writings by Charles Reade in British and American literary criticism from the 19th century to the 21st century. Initially, Reade's legacy received ambivalent even negative reviews due to its excessive sensationalism and daring revelation of some social problems of Victorian society. Later, Reade's works have been recognized as significant in the development of Victorian fiction