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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: From a photograph by Barraud, London.]
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF HALL CAINE'S MANUSCRIPT, FROM "THE
MANXMAN." AN ADDITION MADE IN REVISING PROOFS.]
Hall Caine has no remembrance of the first years which he spent in
Liverpool, and his earliest recollections are of life in his
grandmother's cottage of Ballavolley, Ballaugh, in the Isle of Man, a
house set in a wooded plain surrounded by high mountains which glow,
here yellow with the gorse, there purple with the heather. In the
foreground is the beautiful old church of Ballaugh, in the cemetery of
which many generations of Caines lie at rest; and between the old
church and the village lies the curragh land, full of wild flowers and
musical with the notes of every bird that uplifts its voice to heaven.
Far off can be descried, across the sea, the Mull of Galloway. It is
in its rare beauty a spot than which, for a poet's childhood, no
fitter could be found.
[Illustration: MRS. HALL CAINE. From a photograph by Alfred Ellis,
London.]