A Perilous Secret

A father walks through an October wind with his dying daughter. He has given her his coat, and sits in his shirtsleeves to keep her warm. This is the devastating opening image of Charles Reade's final novel, a story about what happens when a poor man's discovery threatens the comfortable certainties of the rich. William Hope, talented but broken by poverty, finds coal on land owned by the powerful Colonel Clifford, only to be dismissed as a madman and a beggar. As his young daughter Grace fades, William must battle not just starvation but the impenetrable cruelty of a class system that sees his life as worth nothing. A Perilous Secret is Victorian social fiction at its most visceral: a father's love measured against the cold calculus of wealth, and the question of whether a man can retain his dignity when society has decided he has none.