Charles Reade (1814-84), English novelist and playwright, born in Ipsden, Oxfordshire. In 1852 his play Masks and Faces, written with the English dramatist Tom Taylor, was produced. Reade used the play as the basis for the novel Peg Woffington (1853). In 1856 he wrote It Is Never Too Late to Mend, the first of a series of novels of social criticism, exposing the cruelty of prison discipline. Other novels in the same vein include Hard Cash (1863), dealing with conditions in insane asylums; Griffith Gaunt (1866), on jealousy in marriage; and Put Yourself in His Place (1870), on the terrorism of trade unions.

Reade customarily accumulated an immense bulk of documentary material on which he based his books. His masterpiece, The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), is a historical romance based on the life of the father of the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus.