A Terrible Temptation

Last updated

A Terrible Temptation: A Story of the Day
Author Charles Reade
LanguageEnglish
Genre Novel
PublisherLondon: Chapman and Hall
Publication date
August 1871 [1]
Media typePrint (Hardcover)
PagesEnglish 1871 ed. 3 volumes: 303, 310, 300 [1]

A Terrible Temptation: A Story of To-Day is an 1871 sensation novel by Charles Reade. It first appeared serially in Cassell's Magazine in England from March 4 to August 26, 1871. [1] [2] [3]

Similar to 1866's Griffith Gaunt , the novel received negative reviews in the English press due to its content, which included extramartial relations and a courtesan, but this also helped increase sales of Reade's works in America. The Times told parents to keep the book away from their daughters. Reade responded by noting that stories in their paper inspired many of his works, and it was hypocritical to complain about the same type of content they use to sell papers. In subsequent correspondence, Reade noted that he had already sold over 370,000 copies of the novel in the United States, much larger than the Times circulation. [4]

A 2013 review calls the book "a sensation novel which makes Lady Audley's Secret look uneventful and The Woman in White slow-moving." [5]

Related Research Articles

<i>The Picture of Dorian Gray</i> 1890 novel by Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a philosophical novel by Irish writer Oscar Wilde. A shorter novella-length version was published in the July 1890 issue of the American periodical Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. The novel-length version was published in April 1891.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Elizabeth Braddon</span> English popular novelist (1835–1915)

Mary Elizabeth Braddon was an English popular novelist of the Victorian era. She is best known for her 1862 sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret, which has also been dramatised and filmed several times.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dime novel</span> Type of cheap popular fiction in the U.S.

The dime novel is a form of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S. popular fiction issued in series of inexpensive paperbound editions. The term dime novel has been used as a catchall term for several different but related forms, referring to story papers, five- and ten-cent weeklies, "thick book" reprints, and sometimes early pulp magazines. The term was used as a title as late as 1940, in the short-lived pulp magazine Western Dime Novels. In the modern age, the term dime novel has been used to refer to quickly written, lurid potboilers, usually as a pejorative to describe a sensationalized but superficial literary work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wilkie Collins</span> English novelist and playwright (1824–1889)

William Wilkie Collins was an English novelist and playwright known especially for The Woman in White (1859), a mystery novel and early sensation novel, and for The Moonstone (1868), which established many of the ground rules of the modern detective novel and is also perhaps the earliest clear example of the police procedural genre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Taylor</span> English playwright

Tom Taylor was an English dramatist, critic, biographer, public servant, and editor of Punch magazine. Taylor had a brief academic career, holding the professorship of English literature and language at University College, London in the 1840s, after which he practised law and became a civil servant. At the same time he became a journalist, most prominently as a contributor to, and eventually editor of Punch.

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1866.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Reade</span> British novelist and dramatist

Charles Reade was a British novelist and dramatist, best known for The Cloister and the Hearth.

<i>Anthem</i> (novella) 1938 novella by Ayn Rand

Anthem is a dystopian fiction novella by Russian–American writer Ayn Rand, written in 1937 and first published in 1938 in the United Kingdom. The story takes place at an unspecified future date when mankind has entered another Dark Age. Technological advancement is now carefully planned and the concept of individuality has been eliminated. A young man known as Equality 7-2521 rebels by doing secret scientific research. When his activity is discovered, he flees into the wilderness and is followed by Liberty 5-3000, a woman he loves. Together they plan to establish a new society based on rediscovered individualism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Penny dreadful</span> Sensational Victorian weekly story papers

Penny dreadfuls were cheap popular serial literature produced during the 19th century in the United Kingdom. The pejorative term is roughly interchangeable with penny horrible, penny awful, and penny blood. The term typically referred to a story published in weekly parts of 8 to 16 pages, each costing one penny. The subject matter of these stories was typically sensational, focusing on the exploits of detectives, criminals, or supernatural entities. First published in the 1830s, penny dreadfuls featured characters such as Sweeney Todd, Dick Turpin, Varney the Vampire, and Spring-heeled Jack.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ellen Wood (author)</span> English novelist (1814–1887)

Ellen Price was an English novelist better known as Mrs. Henry Wood. She is best remembered for her 1861 novel East Lynne. Many of her books sold well internationally and were widely read in the United States. In her time, she surpassed Charles Dickens in fame in Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rick Geary</span> American cartoonist and illustrator (born 1946)

Rick Geary is an American cartoonist and illustrator. He is known for works such as A Treasury of Victorian Murder and graphic novel biographies of Leon Trotsky and J. Edgar Hoover.

<i>The Penny Magazine</i> British magazine

The Penny Magazine was an illustrated British magazine aimed at the working class, published every Saturday from 31 March 1832 to 31 October 1845. Charles Knight created it for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in response to Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, which started two months earlier. Sold for only a penny and illustrated with wood-engravings, it was an expensive enterprise that could only be supported by very large circulation. Though initially very successful—with a circulation of 200,000 in the first year—it proved too dry and too Whiggish to appeal to the working-class audience it needed to be financially viable. Its competitor—which included a weekly short story—grew more slowly, but lasted much longer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Winwood Reade</span> British historian, explorer, and philosopher

William Winwood Reade was a British historian, explorer, novelist and philosopher. His two best-known books, the universal history The Martyrdom of Man (1872) and the novel The Outcast (1875), were included in the Thinker's Library. Reade published one novel under the pseudonym Francesco Abati.

The sensation novel, also sensation fiction, was a literary genre of fiction that achieved peak popularity in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, centering taboo material shocking to its readers as a means of musing on contemporary social anxieties.

<i>The Cloister and the Hearth</i> 1861 novel by Charles Reade

The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) is an historical novel by the British author Charles Reade. Set in the 15th century, it relates the travels of a young scribe and illuminator, Gerard Eliassoen, through several European countries. The Cloister and the Hearth often describes the events, people and their practices in minute detail. Its main theme is the struggle between man's obligations to family and to Church.

John Camden Hotten was an English bibliophile and publisher. He is best known for his clandestine publishing of numerous erotic and pornographic titles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Henry Friston</span> British artist

David Henry Friston (1820–1906) was a British illustrator and figure painter in the Victorian Era. He is best remembered as the creator of the first illustrations of Sherlock Holmes in 1887, as well as his illustrations of the female vampire story Carmilla (1872). He is also remembered for his illustrations accompanying reviews of Gilbert and Sullivan operas and plays of W. S. Gilbert in The Illustrated London News and the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News in the 1870s and 1880s.

Temple Bar was a literary periodical of the mid and late 19th and very early 20th centuries (1860–1906). The complete title was Temple Bar – A London Magazine for Town and Country Readers. It was initially edited by George Augustus Sala, and Arthur Ransome was the final editor before it folded, while he developed his literary career. It was also edited by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

<i>Griffith Gaunt</i> English novel by Charles Reade, 1866

Griffith Gaunt, or Jealousy is an 1866 sensation novel by Charles Reade. A best-selling book in its day, it was thought by Reade to be his best novel, but critics and posterity have generally preferred The Cloister and the Hearth (1861).

<i>Hard Cash</i> (novel) 1863 novel by Charles Reade

Hard Cash, A Matter-of-Fact Romance is an 1863 novel by Charles Reade. The novel is about the poor treatment of patients in insane asylums and was part of Reade's drive to reform and improve those institutions.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Sadleir, Michael. Excursions in Victorian Bibliography, p. 170 (2019)
  2. (17 August 1871). A Terrible Temptation (review), The Nation , p. 107-08.
  3. At the Circulating Library Periodical Information: Cassell's Magazine, Victorianresearch.com, Retrieved 12 March 2021
  4. Fantina, Richard. Victorian Sensational Fiction: The Daring Work of Charles Reade, p. 32 (2010)
  5. Austin, Finola (4 August 2013). Review: A Terrible Temptation, Charles Reade (1871), The Secret Victorianist