page_title: Hall Caine
section_title: Rossetti years
hierarchical_section_title: Hall Caine / Early life and influences / Rossetti years
caption_attribution_description: English: Dante Gabriel Rossetti walking to and fro while Hall Caine reads his lectures out loud during their stay in a farmhouse at St John's in the Vale, Cumbria.
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: Caine delivered a series of three lectures on Dante Gabriel Rossetti's work and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood movement between November 1878 and March 1879, afterwards combining them into an essay which was printed in Colburn's New Monthly Magazine. Caine sent a copy of the magazine to the poet Rossetti, who by that time had become a virtual recluse and was "ravaged by years of addiction to chloral and too much whisky".
  Rossetti wrote his first letter to Caine on 29 July 1879. This letter was the first of nearly two hundred in quick succession. 
  Around this time Caine's father was badly injured in an accident at work and Caine took responsibility for supporting his parents and siblings. Early in 1880 he wrote Stones Crying Out, a short book on the restoration of old buildings. Two of the chapters were papers he had read at the Social Science Congress and Liverpool Library. Rossetti introduced Caine to Ford Madox Brown, who was at the time working on The Manchester Murals. Following his visit to write an article on Brown's frescoes in July 1880 they became friends. On a later visit Caine accepted Brown's invitation to sit for one of the figures while he was working on The Expulsion of the Danes from Manchester, the third fresco. On another visit he modelled for Crabtree watching the Transit of Venus A.D. 1639, the fifth fresco to be painted. Caine and Rossetti eventually met in September 1880 when Caine visited Rossetti in his home at 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London, where he lived "in shabby splendour".
  The strain of overworking was affecting Caine's health and in 1881, deciding to focus on his literary career, he left his job at Bromley & Son and went to St John's in the Vale, Cumbria. Before long Rossetti wrote that he too was ill and asked Caine to go to London planning to return to Cumbria with him. By the time Caine arrived in London Rossetti had changed his mind and instead Caine became Rossetti's housemate. Early in September, persuaded by friends and family Rossetti spent a month with Caine at St John's in the Vale, accompanied by Fanny Cornforth. Whilst there, Caine recited a local myth to Rossetti. The myth was to become the inspiration for his first novel The Shadow of a Crime. He was also delivering weekly lectures in Liverpool.
  Caine negotiated the acquisition of Rossetti's largest painting Dante's Dream of the Death of Beatrice by Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery, representing the painter at its installation in November 1881. In January 1882 Caine's anthology Sonnets of Three Centuries was published.
  After Rossetti  "had an attack of paralysis on one side", his medical adviser, Mr John Marshall, recommended a change of air. Architect John Seddon offered Rossetti the use of Westcliffe Bungalow at Birchington, Kent. Caine eventually persuaded Rossetti to make the trip to Birchington, and they both arrived on 4 February 1882, accompanied by Caine's sister and Rossetti's nurse. Caine stayed with Rossetti until Rossetti's death on Easter Sunday, 1882.
caption: Dante Gabriel Rossetti walking to and fro while Hall Caine reads his lectures out loud during their stay in a farmhouse at St John's in the Vale, Cumbria.
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