SOURCE: "Unique and Repeated Situations and Themes in Reade's Fiction," in PMLA, Vol. 60, March, 1945, pp. 221-30.

In the following excerpt, Sutcliffe discusses plot devices in Reade's novels.

Charles Reade had the romancer's fondness for startling and rare, even unparalleled incidents, and heaped up thousands of such incidents in his thoroughly documented notebooks.¹ Yet throughout his fiction he utilized the same formulas and situations over and over again. Here is an anomaly which demands analysis and explanation.

I

The melodrama and the romance (and to some degree the epic) must be made up of swift successions of startling incident. Under the heading of "Striking and Pictorial Incidents" Reade collected in his notebooks the materials which made his novels "sensational," the "matter-of-fact romances" that he desired them to be.² Wrecks of vessels,³ and explosions of a forge,⁴ of a grindstone,⁵ of a chimney,⁶ and in a mine,⁷ are matched by...