Hall Caine - A Forgotten Celebrity

By Margaret Brecknell

At the time of his death 90 years ago in August 1931, such was the celebrity of author, Hall Caine, that his family received messages of condolence from King George V and the then Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald.

Thomas Henry Hall Caine was born in Runcorn on 14th May 1853. His father John, who originally hailed from the Isle of Man, had moved to Liverpool to find work in the shipbuilding industry, but at the time of his son’s birth was working temporarily at Runcorn Docks. The family soon returned to Liverpool and “Hall”, as he came to be known (the author is said to have disliked his given first name “Thomas”), grew up in Toxteth.

On leaving school Caine was apprenticed to a Liverpool architect who was a distant relative of the famous Victorian Prime Minister, William Gladstone. From a young age Caine had been sent to visit his father’s family in the small village of Ballaugh on the west coast of the Isle of Man and it was to the island he fled when, three years into his apprenticeship, he began to suffer from what he later described as “the first serious manifestation of the nervous attacks which have pursued me through my life”.

On this occasion he headed to Kirk Maughold in the north of the island to stay with an uncle, James Teare, who ran the local school there. Tragically Teare fell ill with tuberculosis and died soon afterwards. Caine took on his role as schoolmaster for a year before being reportedly persuaded to return to Liverpool on receiving a letter from his former employer which read, “Why on earth are you wasting your life over there? Come back to your proper work at once.”

Back in Liverpool, Caine resumed his training and began to contribute articles on architecture to trade journals such as The Builder. One of his pieces caught the eye of the prominent artist and critic, John Ruskin, and the pair began to correspond. Ruskin was closely associated with the 19th century art movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and another member of the group was destined to play a crucial role in the next stage of Caine’s life.

In November 1878 Caine gave a lecture at the Liverpool Free Library on the work of the renowned poet and artist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. By this time he had started a new job, which, he later recalled in his 1908 autobiography, My Story, that “Making no particular demand on my intellect, left me free to read more and more books of many sorts and to write stories and dramas and essays and articles”.

Above: William Holman Hunt Painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The following year the lecture was published in a literary magazine and came to the attention of Rossetti. The great man wrote to Caine and the two began to correspond regularly. Caine described his association with Rossetti, who was twenty-five years his senior, as his “first great literary friendship”. By the time the two met, Rossetti’s health was already in serious decline because of a longstanding addiction to chloral hydrate. When in the spring of 1881 Caine took the decision to leave his job and focus his attention on pursuing his literary ambitions, Rossetti asked him to join him as his secretary and companion. Caine moved to London and lived with the poet until his death in April 1882.

Rossetti’s influence on the ambitious young man’s development as a writer was considerable. Caine had begun to find regular work as a freelance journalist and was employed as a leader-writer for the Liverpool Mercury, but with Rossetti’s encouragement he also began to contribute literary reviews to prestigious periodicals such as The Academy.

Caine’s association with Rossetti also brought him into contact with many other leading literary figures of the day. One friend whom he first met around this time was Irish author Bram Stoker, who would later dedicate his most famous novel, Dracula, to Caine.

In the autumn of 1883 the now 30-year-old Caine rented a small bungalow close to the sea at Sandown on the Isle of Wight with the intention of writing his first novel there. In the year since his mentor’s death he had gradually come to the realisation that, in his own words, “nobody would go on writing about other people’s writing who could do original writing himself”. He felt the pressure from the start, aware that he only had enough money to last four months and if he did not progress satisfactorily with his work, he would be compelled to return to London penniless and with nothing to show for it. Unsurprisingly, bearing in mind the circumstances, he did suffer at the outset from a serious case of writer’s block. However, he did complete the book and in February 1885 Caine’s first novel, The Shadow of a Crime, was published.

The story of his first novel was inspired by a Cumbrian legend, first told to Caine as a young boy by his maternal grandfather who came from the area, and his second book, A Son of Hagar, was also set in the same area. For his third novel the writer turned to the Isle of Man for inspiration.

According to Caine, Rossetti had been the first to suggest that the island would make a good setting for a book, even going so far as saying that Caine had the potential to become “the bard of Manxland”. Caine certainly pulled out all the stops in The Deemster, a dramatic family saga set around the turn of the 18th-century, with a doomed romance, a fight to the death, the exile and redemption of one of the main characters and a deadly plague just some of the plot devices used by the author to entertain his readers.

The Deemster proved to be a huge commercial success upon publication in 1887 and such was its popularity that the following year it was adapted for the stage under the title Ben-my-Chree.

Several more novels set on the Isle of Man followed. Together with Caine’s colourful descriptions of the Manx landscape, his novels made regular use of the local dialect and borrowed heavily from local culture. Interest in the locations used in his books is said to have boosted the island’s tourist trade, but, surprisingly, on the Isle of Man itself his work was generally less well-received.

Whilst writing The Scapegoat in 1894, Caine had rented a property on the island called Greeba Castle and in 1896 he purchased it outright so that he and his family could

Above: Cartoon of Hall Caine by Harry Furniss

Above: Newspaper advert for 1915 film version of Caines book The Eternal City

take up full-time residence on the Isle of Man. He threw himself wholeheartedly into Manx life and was subsequently, in the early years of the 20th-century, elected on two occasions as a member of the House of Keys (the Isle of Man’s Parliament).

However, some islanders considered his tales of sexual intrigue and violent conflict to portray the inhabitants of the Isle of Man in a bad light. Others criticised him for overplaying his connection to the island for the purposes of publicity. Certainly, Caine’s assertion in My Story that in writing The Deemster he called on his knowledge of Manx lore “acquired during eighteen years of my youth” does seem to suggest an upbringing on the Isle of Man which simply was not the case.

This appears not to be the only instance on which Caine proved to be somewhat economical with the truth. When Caine’s first child, Ralph, was born out of wedlock in 1884 (then viewed as a heinous crime in the eyes of respectable Victorian society), Caine gave the name of the baby’s mother as “Mary Alice Caine formerly Chandler” when registering the birth. The couple were not actually married until two years later in a secret ceremony in Edinburgh,

By the turn of the 20th-century Hall Caine was one of the bestknown authors in the world. In the current age he would probably have been a huge social media star. He was more than happy to court publicity, inviting reporters over to his home on the Isle of Man to conduct interviews and take photographs. Postcards of Greeba Castle and its famous resident were produced in huge quantities to be purchased by fans who would turn up at his Isle of Man home in an attempt to catch a glimpse of their hero. Caine took great pains over his personal appearance, cultivating a distinctive look which some commentators likened to William Shakespeare. Knowing Caine’s instinct for attracting publicity, his seeming resemblance to the Elizabeth playwright was probably no coincidence.

When, in August 1902, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra visited the Isle of Man whilst touring round Britain on the Royal Yacht, it was Caine who was invited aboard and accompanied them on their tour of the island the following day.

Bearing in mind his huge popularity, it came as no surprise when Caine’s novels were among the first to be adapted for the big screen during the silent movie era. Caine’s younger son, Derwent, even starred in a couple of the films. Probably the best-remembered today is the 1929 adaptation of Caine’s best-selling novel, The Manxman, which was directed by the great Alfred Hitchcock and was the last of Hitchcock’s films to be a non-talkie.

It would be all too easy to dismiss Caine as an egotistical selfpublicist with a flair for producing melodramatic novels. However, there was another side to the author which is sometimes overlooked.

Caine travelled widely, making research visits for background information to use in his novels to places such as Iceland, Morocco and Egypt, whose customs and way of life would have been little known to most of his readers. The plot of his 1891 novel The Scapegoat is

Above: Blue plaque outside Caines birthplace in Runcorn - ©Stuart Allen/CC BY-SA4.0

based around a Jewish family in Morocco and the persecution they face because of their faith. As a result of his sympathetic portrayal of the Jewish plight in Morocco, which he had witnessed first-hand, Caine was approached by Hermann Adler, the Chief Rabbi and Chairman of the Russo-Jewish Committee in London.

Adler wished to send support to Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, who were also being persecuted, but realised that, as a Jew himself, he would be refused entry. According to The Illustrated London News, he asked Caine “to visit Russia for the purpose of ascertaining the facts, with a view to fairly and faithfully illustrating the condition of the Jews in that country”. Caine readily accepted to undertake what the newspaper described as “a serious responsibility”, funding the expenses for the trip out of his own pocket.

The writer showed his philanthropic side again early on in World War I when in December 1914, he edited King Albert’s Book. This publication, which was said to be Caine’s own idea, was produced by The Daily Telegraph with the aim of using the sales proceeds to assist Belgian refugees in the UK.

During the war Caine was recruited by the British Government to help with the propaganda effort. A wellknown figure in the United States, who had visited there on several occasions previously, Caine wrote extensively for the New York Times, urging the Americans to join the war on the side of the Allies.

Caine was rewarded with a knighthood in 1918, but, in truth, by this time his literary career was already in decline. Increasingly, he came to be viewed as a relic of the Victorian era, whose style was now considered out-of-date.

When he died, aged 78, at Greeba Castle in August 1931, some 60,000 people were reported to have turned out to witness his funeral procession. However, one newspaper obituary comments that “he will be remembered as a popular rather than a great novelist”, adding that “His obsession with moral problems gave much of his work a meretricious appeal, and led him into cheap sensationalism and hackneyed situations”.

Today the man, who once associated with royalty and had legions of fans around the world, is little remembered, even on his beloved Isle of Man. Perhaps therein lies a message for today’s stars of social media regarding the fleeting nature of celebrity.