By the advice of the actress, Laura Seymour, he turned the play into a prose story which appeared in 1853 as Peg Woffington.

[4] He made his name as a novelist in 1856, when he published It Is Never Too Late to Mend, a novel written to reform abuses in prison discipline and the treatment of criminals.

[4] White Lies started as a translation of Auguste Maquet's play Le Château de Grantier.

After managers declined the manuscript, Reade adapted the story, weaving it into a novel which was serialised in The London Journal and published in three volumes the same year.

[5] In 1861 Reade published what would become his most famous work, based on a few lines by the medieval humanist Erasmus about the life of his parents.

The novel began life as a serial in Once a Week in 1859 under the title "A Good Fight", but when Reade disagreed with the proprietors of the magazine over some of the contentious subject matter (principally the unmarried pregnancy of the heroine), he abruptly curtailed the serialisation with a false happy ending.

At intervals throughout his literary career, he sought to gratify his dramatic ambition, hiring a theatre and engaging a company for the production of his plays.

His greatest success as a dramatist attended his last attempt—Drink—an adaptation of Émile Zola's L'Assommoir, produced in 1879,[4] and made into the film Drink in 1917.

On his death, he left behind him a completed novel, A Perilous Secret, which showed he was still skilled in the arts of weaving a complicated plot and devising thrilling situations.

"[6] Reade is buried alongside Laura Seymour, in the churchyard of St. Mary's Church, Willesden, in north-west London.

The collection was extensive and well-organized, and he had planned to use it as a basis for an unrealized work in "the wisdom and folly of nations," dealing with social, political and domestic details.

The following assessment by Justin McCarthy, writing in 1872, is typical:A strong, healthy air of honest and high purpose breathes through nearly all the stories.

Mr. Reade can describe a sea-fight, a storm, the forging of a horseshoe, the ravages of an inundation, the trimming of a lady's dress, the tuning of a piano, with equal accuracy and apparent zest.

He is a magnificent specimen of the modern special correspondent, endowed with the additional and unique gift of a faculty for throwing his report into the form of a thrilling story.

He possessed vast stocks of disconnected information which a lively narrative gift allowed him to cram into books which would at any rate pass as novels.

If you have the sort of mind that takes a pleasure in dates, lists, catalogues, concrete details, descriptions of processes, junk-shop windows and back numbers of the Exchange and Mart, the sort of mind that likes knowing exactly how a medieval catapult worked or just what objects a prison cell of the eighteen-forties contained, then you can hardly help enjoying Reade.

John Betjeman's poem "In Willesden Churchyard" includes a reference to "Laura Seymour's grave-/ 'So long the loyal counsellor and friend'/Of that Charles Reade whose coffin lies with hers/Was she his mistress?"