Hard Cash revolves around the sum of £14,000, of which a bankrupt banker Richard Hardie defrauds David Dodd, a sea-captain. Upon realizing his loss Dodd has a cataleptic shock and goes insane. Hardie's son Alfred, who loves Dodd's daughter Julia, detects his father's wrongdoing and confronts him about it, so Hardie puts him in a private insane asylum to keep him quiet. Trying to keep a straight mind among the insane, Alfred meets and befriends Dodd, and when a fire breaks out they manage to escape, having one thing on their mind.

Charles Reade (1814-1884) was an English novelist and dramatist, best known for The Cloister and the Hearth. Reade began his literary career as a dramatist, making his reputation by the two-act comedy, Masks and Faces. He made his name as a novelist and became famous because of his novel The Cloister and the Hearth which was based on a few lines by the medieval humanist Erasmus about the life of his parents.