1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Caine, Thomas Henry Hall

CAINE, THOMAS HENRY HALL (1853–  ), British novelist and dramatist, was born of mixed Manx and Cumberland parentage at Runcorn, Cheshire, on the 14th of May 1853. He was educated with a view to becoming an architect, but turned to journalism, becoming a leader-writer on the Liverpool Mercury. He came up to London at the suggestion of D. G. Rossetti, with whom he had had some correspondence, and lived with the poet for some time before his death. He published a volume of Recollections of Rossetti (1882), and also some critical work; but in 1885 he began an extremely successful career as a novelist of a melodramatic type with The Shadow of a Crime, followed by The Son of Hagar (1886), The Deemster (1887), The Bondman (1890), The Scapegoat (1891), The Manxman (1894), The Christian (1897), The Eternal City (1901), and The Prodigal Son (1904). His writings on Manx subjects were acknowledged by his election in 1901 to represent Ramsey in the House of Keys. The Deemster, The Manxman and The Christian had already been produced in dramatic form, when The Eternal City was staged with magnificent accessories by Mr Beerbohm Tree in 1902, and in 1905 The Prodigal Son had a successful run at Drury Lane.

See C. F. Kenyon, Hall Caine; The Man and the Novelist (1901); and the novelist’s autobiography, My Story (1908).