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 — 63 copies
Shadow of a Crime; The Deemster 9 copies
世界大衆文学全集. 第7巻 3 copies
A mulher que Deus me deu - Volume I 2 copies
Manboen 2 copies
En Kristen. II Bind 2 copies
Son of Hagar 1 copy
Den evige Stad. 1.-2. Del / 1 copy
The Bondman Play 1 copy
En kristen. 1 1 copy
Erfelijk belast 1 copy
Three By Hall Caine: "The Last Confession," "The Blind Mother," and "She's All the World to Me" (2009) 1 copy
Maxman 1 copy
Hall Caine's Best Books in Three Volumes, Volume III: Son of Hagar - She's All the World to Me 1 copy
Valkoinen profeetta 2 1 copy
Syndebukken 1 copy
Mona 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
Hagars son 1 1 copy
Hagars son 2 1 copy
Slaven, Bind I 1 copy
Slaven, Bind II 1 copy
Skuggan af ett brott : Roman 1 copy
Valkoinen profeetta 1 1 copy
Inför högre rätt 2 1 copy
Associated Works
Saga Six Pack 8 - The Bondman, Book of Michael Sunlocks, Red Jason, The Waif Woman, Grettir the Outlaw, Greek and Northern Mythologies (Illustrated) (2017) — Contributor, some editions — 9 copies
Household Words — Editor, some editions — 4 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
- Gender
- male
- 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. - Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Runcorn, Cheshire, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Runcorn, Cheshire, England, UK (birth)
Isle of Man, UK (death) - Burial location
- Kirk Maughold churchyard, Isle of Man, UK
- Associated Place (for map)
- Isle of Man, UK
Members
Reviews
This long, shaggy Victorian novel centres on a classic love-triangle plot: the cousins Philip and Peter, poor relatives of a distinguished Manx landowning family, are boyhood friends. Charitable relatives fix up for Philip to go to school and train for the Manx bar, doors that are closed to the illegitimate Pete; he grows up to become a semi-literate fisherman. But the boys remain close, and when Pete decides to join the Kimberley diamond rush to try to earn enough to satisfy the father of show more his intended bride, Kate, he charges Philip with the responsibility of looking after her until he gets back.
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... show less
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... show less
This was a very different read from the Manxman. While that was dense and long, this was a short tale easily read in a couple of hours. It's a story about a piece of history that has mostly been forgotten - when the first world war broke out, many of the civilian Germans in England were interred in a prisoner of war camp on the Isle of Man. This book is set in the camp, and tells the story of the love between the farmer's daughter, and one of the Germans.
It is a very 'of it's time' romance, show more they fall exquisitely deeply in love through the very slightest of interactions, a look, an exchange of a handful of words, but what they feel is known between them like a current. And oh, it is a sad story. The cruelty of everyone judging them for their love is breathtaking - she is thrown off her farm, has all her wealth taken from her because the government has put a prisoner of war camp on her land and she is responsible for making the land farmable again, and even her lover's mother hates her very existence. The 'so we will throw ourselves off this cliff' ending feels contrived and melodramatic, but they do really have no corner of the world left to them, which is heartbreaking and wrong. show less
It it quite strange to realise there is an author who was the first person to sell more than a million copies of a book, with worldwide fame, who is now ... mostly just forgotten? I read this book because I was going to the Isle of Man and wanted to read a famous local book. There is a lot of it, and you spend a lot of it wishing they would all just talk to each other more. Pete is so infuriatingly caricaturistly nice, and I could have done with less of Philip dithering between his loyalty show more to his friend, the woman he loves, and his precious reputation. Like, it is good that the book shows him finally realising how his standing with God and his personal honesty is worth more than a career built on lies, but maybe he could have done that in half as many pages and saved Pete a world of pain. show less
I picked up this book not out of interest of Samuel Coleridge, but merely out of interest for it's age and presentation (1887, first edition, tidy green cloth cover). I was pleasantly surprised when I began reading that the book itself is considerably interesting.
The book follows the trials and tribulations of the life of ST Coleridge, poet, writer, journalist & sometimes speaker. It covers his youthful schemes, his life long struggle to earn a living from his writing, his battle with opium show more as well as his rather odd family life.
All in all it's an interesting snapshot of one mans life in the late 1700s/early 1800s, well worth the time. show less
The book follows the trials and tribulations of the life of ST Coleridge, poet, writer, journalist & sometimes speaker. It covers his youthful schemes, his life long struggle to earn a living from his writing, his battle with opium show more as well as his rather odd family life.
All in all it's an interesting snapshot of one mans life in the late 1700s/early 1800s, well worth the time. show less
Lists
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 83
- Also by
- 5
- Members
- 616
- Popularity
- #40,814
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 8
- ISBNs
- 199
