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The Sheffield Flood: A Critical Study of Charles Reade's Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Wayne Burns
Wayne Burns*
Affiliation:
University of California
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Extract

Malcolm El Win'S treatment of Charles Reade's documentary method is for the most part sound, yet his suggested sources for the “flood scenes” of Put Yourself in His Place (1870) are incomplete and misleading. While he is correct in saying that Reade “enacted his principal researches at Sheffield”, and that “the scene of the novel [Sheffield] is thinly disguised under the name of Hillsborough”, he is wrong in assuming that Reade derived his “flood scenes” from the materials included in one of his notebooks.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 63 , Issue 2 , June 1948 , pp. 686 - 695
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1948

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References

1 Charles Reade (London, 1931), pp. 203-4.

2 See Emerson Grant Sutcliffe, “The Stage in Reade's Novels”, SP, xxvii (1930), 66972; and Wayne Burns, “Pre-Raphaelitism in Charles Reade's Early Fiction”, PMLA, lx (1945), 1149-64 passim.

3 I am assuming the accuracy and fullness of Elwin's description; I have not seen the notebook he mentions. According to Elwin, p. 362, Reade began the actual writing of Put Yourself in His Place in June, 1868.

4 Page iii.

5 The “flood scenes” comprise the greater part of Chapter xliii, and all of xxiv and xlv. All my references are to the Grolier Edition, Volume ii, hereinafter referred to as PYHP.

6 Cf. Harrison, pp. 9-16, with PYHP, pp. 631-42.

7 Cf. Harrison, p. 12, with PYHP, p. 636. Unmistakable verbal parallels are too numerous to cite in full. It is perhaps worth noting that Reade made good use of certain scraps of dialogue reported by Harrison, e.g. the real Mr. Ibbotson's comment (“I can't learn that this cracking in a new embankment is a common thing. Danger or no danger I don't go to bed; I shall keep my clothes on, ready for off”). Reade attributed to his farmer Ives: “I can't learn from any of you that an enlarging crack in a new embankment is a common thing. I shall go home, but my boots won't come off this night.” Harrison, p. 19; PYHP, p. 638.

8 Cf. Harrison, pp. 12-16, with PYHP, pp. 636-42. “Mr. Fountain, one of the contractors for the construction of the dam” became in PYHP “Mr. Mountain, one of the contractors who had built the dam.” The farmer Ives and Mr. Carter of the novel are modelled after Mr. William Ibbotson and Mr. Craven.

9 PYHP, p. 637; Harrison, p. 13.

10 PYHP, p. 633; Harrison, p. 21.

11 Cf. Harrison, p. 27, with PYHP, p. 640.

12 While Reade probably supplemented Harrison's account with other “facts” of one kind or another, the only passage which seems clearly to have originated from a different source is the one describing a child in its cradle on the morning after the flood an incident, Reade adds, which “the genius of my friend Mr. Millais is about to render immortal.” Cf. Harrison, pp. 68, 70, with PYHP, p. 665.

13 PYHP, pp. 665-6; Harrison, p. 49.

14 Cf. Harrison, pp. 33,40, 75, with PYHP, p. 649; and Harrison, pp. 25,66, with PYHP, p. 653.

15 PYHP, pp. 651-2; Harrison, pp. 25-6,48.

16 PYHP, p. 665.

17 PYHP, p. 647; see also p. 629, and cf. Harrison, p. 91.

18 Harrison, pp. 13, 16, 26; PYHP, p. 634.

19 See PYHP, pp. 639-47. Harrison (p. 16) quotes “the Government inspector” as saying, “Not even a Derby horse could have carried the warning in time to have saved the people down the valley.” Interestingly enough, “Ransome's ride” is technically within the bounds of Harrison's facts, but only technically : in spirit it goes far beyond anything in the journalistic account.

20 Cf. Harrison, pp. 68, 80, with PYBP, p. 661.

21 Harrison, p. 84.

22 PYEP, p. 659; cf. Harrison, pp. 27, 68,80, 84. It is possible, of course, that Reade was not relying entirely on Harrison in this instance, since the settings of the two scenes differ in certain particulars: in the journalistic account the dead bodies are described as lying “in the railway station”; in the novel as “lying in a lake of mud about the very door of the railway station.”

23 Harrison, p. 88; cf. p. 80 and PYBP, p. 664.

24 PYH?, p. 660.

25 PYHP, pp. 649-50. Cf. Harrison, p. 80. Bret Harte's parody of PYHP is a perfect commentary on this passage. See Bret Harte, Condensed Novels (Boston, 1871), pp. 1-19.

26 W. T. Young (CHEL, xii, ii, 476) has singled out these flood scenes as a prime example of Reade's “pure narrative of action… depicted with a power which makes the reader a participant in the event, sets the pulse throbbing faster and keeps the mind tense with solicitude for the outcome.” Such praise is difficult to understand, and in my opinion impossible to justify, unless one can accept these chapters as a series of wild adventures, to be judged as “adventures”, and not as part of a realistic novel.

27 See Albert Morton Turner, The Making of “The Cloister and the Hearth” (Chicago, 1938), passim; and Wayne Burns, “The Cloister and the Hearth: A Classic Reconsidered”; The Trollopian: A Journal of Victorian Fiction, ii (1947), 71-82.

28 For a complete discussion of the problems raised here, see my unpublished doctoral dissertation, Charles Reade: The Making of a Social Novelist (Cornell, 1946).

29 See Emerson Grant Sutcliffe, “Charles Reade in His Heroes”, The Trollopian, No. 2 (March, 1946), pp. 3-15.

30 See Ernest J. Simmons, Dostoevski: The Making of a Novelist (New York, 1940), pp. 154-83, 385-8; Lionel Trilling, “Art and Neurosis”, The Partisan Review (Winter, 1945), pp. 43-6. The comparison between Reade and Dostoevski is peculiarly apt in that Dostoevski's theories of fiction parallel Reade's in important respects. See further Simmons, pp. 141-3,154-6,181-2,200-1,252-4,290-9,344,362,366.

31 The Cloister and the Hearth has been elevated to its present position at the expense of Reade's other works. As Hugh Walpole has said: “His [Reade's] fame has also been hampered by the excessive popularity of his most famous novel. Had he never written The Cloister And The Hearth there is no doubt but that Griffith Gaunt, Put Yourself in His Place, and Foul Play would be awarded a higher critical position than they are. In many ways indeed Griffith Gaunt is the best novel that he ever wrote.” See further Hugh Walpole, “Novelists of the Seventies”, in The Eighteen Seventies, edited by Harley Granville-Barker (New York, 1929), pp. 33-6.

32 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Miscellanies (London, 1886), p. 301. See also above, footnote 26. Swinburne's criticism of Put Yourself In His Place lays so much stress on the flood scenes that it is worth quoting in full: “… There are characteristic and serious faults in the story called Put yourself in his place; the sublimely silly old squire is a venerable stage property not worth so much refurbishing as the author's care has bestowed on it; the narrative is perhaps a little overcharged with details of documentary evidence; but the hero, the villain, and the two or three heroines are all excellently well drawn; the construction or composition of the story is a model of ingenuity, delicacy, and vigour; and the account of the inundation is another of those triumphant instances of masterful and superb description which give actually the same delight, evoke the same admiration, stimulate and satisfy the same intense and fervid interest, on a tenth as on a first reading.”

33 This summary appraisal is based on a full critical study of Reade that I am now preparing for publication.