ABSTRACT
Very soon after British sensation writer Charles Reade's It Is Never Too Late to Mend was published, stage adaptations by other writers began to appear. Reade had collaborated before with well-known British sensation dramatists such as Tom Taylor and Dion Boucicault. Although little known today except among a few Victorian scholars, Charles Reade was considered by many of his contemporaries to be one of the major writers of nineteenth-century Britain and America. Walter Frewen Lord, for instance, included Reade among the twelve "great artists" in his Mirror of the Century. The method Reade consciously developed for writing his novels and plays depended on heavily researched factual realism to create vivid sensations and emotions in his audience in order to motivate them to social action. Reade's literary reputation commenced with the simultaneous publication of his third novel, It Is Never Too Late to Mend, in England and America in 1856.
