STORY OF HIS LIFE AND WORK, DERIVED FROM CONVERSATIONS.
By Robert Harborough Sherard.
Extreme dignity is the leading characteristic of Thomas Henry Hall Caine as a man, just as extreme conscientiousness is his leading characteristic as a writer. He possesses in a high degree the sense of the responsibility which an author owes to the public and to himself. It is on account of these facts that the story of his uneventful life and brilliant literary career is a highly interesting one. It shows how, by firmness of principle and a high respect of the public and himself, a man of undoubted genius has been enabled to raise himself to a position in the English-speaking worlds to which few men of letters have ever attained—a position which may be compared to that of a vates amongst the Romans, of a prophet in Israel.
Hall Caine, as his double name implies, comes of the mixed Norse and Celtic race which constitutes the population of the Isle of Man. Hall, his mother's name, is Norse, and is common to this day in Iceland, from which the Norsemen came to Manxland. Caine, which means "a fighter with clubs," is Celtic. Hall Caine himself, with his ruddy beard and hair and distinctive features, has inherited rather the physical characteristics of his maternal ancestors, the Norsemen.
BALLAVOLLEY COTTAGE, BALLAUGH, ISLE OF MAN, WHERE HALL CAINE LIVED AS A LITTLE BOY.
He comes of a stock of crofters, or small farmers, who for centuries had supported themselves by tilling the soil and fishing the sea. He is the first of all his line who ever worked his brain for a living. His grandfather, who had a farm of sixty acres in the beautiful parish of Ballaugh, which lies between Peel and Ramsey, was a wastrel, fond of the amusements and dissipations to be found in Douglas, and alienated his small property, so that, at the age of eighteen, his son, Hall Caine's father, was for a living obliged to apprentice himself to a blacksmith at Ramsey. When he had learned his trade he removed, in the hopes of finding more remunerative employment, to Liverpool. Here, however, he found it so hard to support himself as a blacksmith that he set to work to learn the trade of ship's smith—a remunerative one in those days, when Liverpool was the centre of the ship-building trade. He became a skilled worker, and at the time of his marriage was able to command a wage of thirty-six shillings a week, in addition to what he was able to earn by piece work. It was whilst engaged on a piece of work on a ship at Runcorn, in Cheshire, that on May 14, 1853, the child was born—his second son—to whom he gave the names of Thomas Henry Hall. Runcorn can thus claim to be the birthplace of the famous writer, although his birth there was a mere accident, and not more than ten days of his life were spent there.
From a photograph by Barraud, London.