By Charles Reade.

‘Hard Cash like ‘The Cloister and the Hearth' is a matter-of-fact Romance—that is, a fiction built on truths ; and these truths have been gathered by long, severe, systematic labour, from a multitude of volumes, pamphlets, journals, reports, blue-books, manuscript narratives, letters, and living people, whom I have sought out, examined, and cross-examined, to get at the truth on each main topic I have striven to handle. The madhouse scenes have been picked out by certain disinterested gentlemen, who keep private asylums, and periodicals to puff them ; and have been met with bold denials of public facts, and with timid personalities, and a little easy cant about Sensation * Novelists ; but in reality those passages have been written on the same system as the nautical, legal, and other scenes : the best evidence has been ransacked ; and a large portion of this evidence I shall be happy to show at my house to any brother writer who is disinterested, and really cares enough for truth and humanity to walk or ride a mile in pursuit of them.” (From Preface)

London: Chatto and Windus, 1899. 625p.