Hall Caine (1853–1931)
Author of King Albert's Book: A Tribute to the Belgian King and People from Representative Men and Women Throughout the World
About the Author
Image credit: "The Manxman" Caine as caricatured in Vanity Fair, July 1896
Works by Hall Caine
King Albert's Book: A Tribute to the Belgian King and People from Representative Men and Women Throughout the World (1914) — Contributor — 56 copies
Shadow of a Crime; The Deemster 7 copies
世界大衆文学全集. 第7巻 3 copies
Kvinnan som du gav mig 2 3 copies
En Kristen. II Bind 2 copies
A mulher que Deus me deu - Volume I 2 copies
Manboen 2 copies
Syndebukken 1 copy
VALKOINEN PROFEETTA 1 1 copy
VALKOINEN PROFEETTA 2 1 copy
The Shadow of a Crime, The Deemster / The Bondman, The Blind Mother, The Last Confession (Hall Caine's Best Books,… (1930) 1 copy
Den evige Stad. 1.-2. Del / 1 copy
Son of Hagar Hall 1 copy
The Bondman Play 1 copy
Skuggan af ett brott : Roman 1 copy
Inför högre rätt 2 1 copy
En kristen. 1 1 copy
Inför högre rätt 1 1 copy
Inför högre rätt 3 1 copy
Manxmannen 1 1 copy
Manxmannen 2 1 copy
Manxmannen 3 1 copy
Kvinnan som du gav mig 3 1 copy
Mona 1 copy
Hagars son 1 1 copy
Hagars son 2 1 copy
Slaven, Bind I 1 copy
Slaven, Bind II 1 copy
Associated Works
Saga Six Pack 8 - The Bondman, Book of Michael Sunlocks, Red Jason, The Waif Woman, Grettir the Outlaw, Greek and… (2017) — Contributor, some editions — 6 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Caine, Thomas Henry Hall, Sir
- Other names
- Caine, Hall
- Birthdate
- 1853-05-14
- Date of death
- 1931-08-31
- Burial location
- Kirk Maughold churchyard, Isle of Man, UK
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Runcorn, Cheshire, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Runcorn, Cheshire, England, UK (birth)
Isle of Man, UK (death) - Occupations
- novelist
draughtsman - Awards and honors
- Order of the British Empire (Knight, 1918)
- Short biography
- Hall Caine was an enormously popular and best-selling author in his time. Crowds would gather outside his houses hoping to get a glimpse of him. He was "accorded the adulation reserved now for pop stars and footballers", and yet he is now virtually unknown.
Vivien Allen suggests two reasons for this. First that, in comparison with Dickens, his characters are not clearly drawn, they are "frequently fuzzy at the edges" while Dickens' characters are "diamond-clear"; and Caine's characters also tend to be much the same as each other. Something similar could also be said about his plots. Possibly the main drawback is that although Caine's books can be romantic and emotionally moving, they lack humour; they are deadly earnest and serious.
Members
Reviews
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Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 75
- Also by
- 3
- Members
- 563
- Popularity
- #44,421
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 6
- ISBNs
- 188
- Languages
- 1
The inevitable happens, ambitious Kate falls for the dashing young law student, and when false news of Pete's death arrives the two of them take an ill-advised roll in the hay after the Melliah (harvest dinner). Pete turns up alive shortly afterwards, and Kate finds herself pressured into going through with the planned marriage after all. Needless to say, there is no good way out of this situation, and things rapidly get worse...
I started reading this book with the hope that I would find that Caine had been unfairly neglected, as happens to so many hugely popular authors after their deaths. But, whilst it's easy to see why he was so successful, it's also hard to make a case for reviving him, at least on the evidence of this book.
He's a wonderfully fluent, easy-to-read writer, his prose doesn't have any of that late-Victorian stiffness or Edwardian archness that often plagues books from the turn of the century. And he has an obvious gift for lively, funny, original dialogue: the Manx dialect and syntax are never allowed to get in the way of intelligibility. The book is full of quaint local colour, from rustic inns and agricultural customs to the pageantry of Tynwald Day (Caine is credited with founding the Manx tourist industry), and there are plenty of comic incidents, many of them centering around Kate's father, Caesar, who somehow manages to combine the roles of miller, publican and evangelical preacher.
On the other hand, Caine never refuses an opportunity to throw in a melodramatic incident or a moralistic cliché. The timeline makes no sense at all: Philip goes through his entire career from pupillage to being a respected senior judge in the time it takes his putative daughter to get from conception to first steps. The characters consistently act in ways that are — at best — implausible in psychological and narrative terms, and Caine is clearly not the kind of writer to fuss himself about piddling little details like calendars, wind-and-tide, legal procedures, inheritance customs, etc. The closing scene, while spectacular, is one that would have a hard time being taken seriously even on the stage of an opera house. In a novel it comes over as pure fantasy: this is not the Manx Tess so much as the Manx Iolanthe...… (more)