SOURCE: "The Cloister and the Hearth: A Popular Response to the Oxford Movement," in Religion and Literature, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall, 1986, pp. 71-88.

In the following excerpt, Vitanza observes that The Cloister and the Hearth not only faults the enforced celibacy but also the isolation from worldly concerns associated with the Oxford Movement.

Charles Reade, the nineteenth-century novelist whom the young Henry James called "to our mind the most readable of living English novelists and … a distant kinsman of Shakespeare" (207) and who, in the estimation of many of his contemporaries, "after the death of Thackeray and of Dickens … divided with George Eliot the reputation of being the greatest living novelist" (Phillips 20), is all but ignored in literary criticism today. Except for passing comment in literary histories, Reade is the subject of only an occasional article or dissertation. This current neglect leads one to forget the strength of Reade's reputation...