Hard Cash

by Charles Reade


PREFACE

"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.

CHARLES READE.

6 BOLTON ROW, MAYFAIR,
December 5, 1868.