page_title: Hall Caine
section_title: Journalist and theatre critic
hierarchical_section_title: Hall Caine / Early life and influences / Journalist and theatre critic
caption_attribution_description: English: Poster advertising The shadow of a crime
context_page_description: Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine CH KBE, usually known as Hall Caine, was a British novelist, dramatist, short story writer, poet and critic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Caine's popularity during his lifetime was unprecedented. He wrote fifteen novels on subjects of adultery, divorce, domestic violence, illegitimacy, infanticide, religious bigotry and women's rights, became an international literary celebrity, and sold a total of ten million books. Caine was the most highly paid novelist of his day. The Eternal City is the first novel to have sold over a million copies worldwide. In addition to his books, Caine is the author of more than a dozen plays and was one of the most commercially successful dramatists of his time; many were West End and Broadway productions. Caine adapted seven of his novels for the stage. He collaborated with leading actors and managers, including Wilson Barrett, Viola Allen, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Louis Napoleon Parker, Mrs Patrick Campbell, George Alexander, and Arthur Collins. Most of Caine's novels were adapted into silent black and white films. A. E.
context_section_description: In April 1872, at the age of eighteen, Caine was back home in Liverpool where he set about applying his knowledge, gained working in the drawing office, into articles on architectural subjects, and subsequently published in The Builder and The Building News. These were Caine's first works published for a national audience. The articles caught Ruskin's attention and he wrote words of encouragement to Caine.
  Seeking to be published, he offered his services, without payment, as a theatre critic to a number of Liverpool newspapers, which were accepted. He used the pseudonym 'Julian'. Before Henry Irving played Hamlet, his intention to play the part differently to any other actor was known to Caine and he contributed many articles on the subject to various papers. The study of Shakespeare and the Bible from his earliest years were his 'chief mental food'. As he had become more absorbed by literary studies he was not content with reading Shakespeare's plays, so he was reading all of the most notable playwrights of the Elizabethan age and "he began to make acquaintance with the dramatists". In the summer of 1872 Caine wrote his first play.  The Charter was an adaptation of Charles Kingsley's novel Alton Locke, but as an unknown writer he could not get it staged.  "Partly from the failure of faith in myself as a draughtsman and partly from a desire to be moving on" Caine left his employment with Murray and joined the office of Richard Owen and later Wainwright and Son. For a few years he was general assistant to a builder, James Bromley who became his friend.
  Together with William Tirebuck and George Rose, his friends from school days, Caine applied himself to establishing Liverpool branches of the Shakespeare Society, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. They called their own organisation Notes and Queries Society and held their meetings at the prominent Royal Institution, Colquitt Street. Caine was president of the society and their meetings were reported in the Liverpool newspapers. The 'Notes' were often provided by John Ruskin, William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
  On 16 October 1874 Henry Irving wrote to Caine agreeing to his request to use his portrait in Stray Leaves a new monthly magazine he was launching. In his capacity as critic of the Liverpool Town Crier, Caine attended the first night of Hamlet at the Lyceum Theatre, London, on 31 October 1874, with Irving in the title role. Caine was enthralled by Irving's performance and after his enthusiastic review was published in the newspaper, he was asked to reprint it as a broad-sheet pamphlet, as it was of such a high quality.
  Caine's first short story Max Wieland was published in the Liverpool Critic around 1874. A year later Caine became dramatic critic of the Spectator. Caine's long narrative poem, Geraldine, appeared in print in March 1876. It was a completion of Coleridge's unfinished poem Christabel.
  The Caine family had moved into a larger house in 1873, at 59 South Chester Street, Toxteth, where Caine shared a bedroom with his younger brother John, a shipping clerk. John contracted tuberculosis which he passed to his brother. By 1875 Caine had permanent lodgings in New Brighton, spending weekends there "for the sake of his health". Caine became increasingly unwell from the beginning of January 1877. In April the same year John, died from tuberculosis, aged 21. Dangerously ill, Caine was terrified of suffering the same fate. He recovered, but the disease left him with permanent lung damage, and throughout his life he had attacks of bronchitis. In his 1913 novel The Woman Thou Gavest Me, he describes Mary O’Neil dying of tuberculosis.
  Manchester Corporation had covertly been buying land for building the proposed Thirlmere Aqueduct, intended to supply water to the city. When discovered, it outraged the local community. Thirlmere, close to the centre of the Lake District, in an area, not only celebrated in the poetry of early conservationist William Wordsworth and fellow Lake poets, but also used as a summer residence by writers, amongst othe
caption: 1895 Poster advertising The Shadow of a Crime.
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