A Terrible Temptation: A Story of To-Day by Charles Reade

Description

A Terrible Temptation opens in the morning-room of a large house in Portman Square, where a gentleman in the prime of life is making himself agreeable to a young lady in a way that is entirely proper, except in every respect at once. Charles Reade — the novelist who had made Grub Street talk with Hard Cash and Put Yourself in His Place — here at the height of his fame in 1871 stages a moral catastrophe with Victorian discretion and Victorian frankness in equal measure.

The temptation of the title is not a passing weakness. Reade builds it slowly, through the empty hours of fashionable marriage, the loneliness of an accomplished lady, and the persuasiveness of a man whose charm is inseparable from his usefulness. But the book’s real subject is what follows temptation: secrecy, blackmail, and the grinding machinery of English law descending on lives that believe themselves respectable.

Reade was the most fiercely argumentative of the major Victorian novelists — a crusader who used fiction as an instrument of reform — and here his target is the cruelty of the law as it touched women and the poor. Yet the novel never loses its storytelling heat. The trial scenes are engineered with the lawyerly precision that made his contemporaries both admire and fear him, and the final courtroom reversal arrives with the force of a theatrical coup de théâtre.

Why readers pick it up

• Victorian sensation at full pressure: scandal, transgression, and a courtroom showdown.
• Reade’s signature blend of crusading social argument and irresistible plotting.
• A book that scandal-mongered 1871 audiences and still reads as fearless.

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition brings you the complete text with clean professional typesetting, a working table of contents, and chapter navigation tuned for long sessions on phone, tablet, or e-reader.