Reminded of novelist Hall Caine while strolling the prom in Douglas, we went on to visit a few more of the locations associated with his life and work.

And I read The Manxman.

Published in 1894, this novel sold nigh on 40,000 copies, was translated into a number of languages, and was made into a silent film directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1929)...

Thomas Henry Hall Caine (1853-1931) was actually born in England. But his father was Manx, and during his youth he regularly spent time on the Island with his uncles and his grandmother (it was she who provided much of the folkloric material that he was later to draw on in his novels). When he started writing novels, friend and mentor Dante Gabriel Rossetti encouraged him to focus on the Isle of Man, and carve himself a niche as "the bard of Manxland". The Deemster (1887) was the first novel to reflect this change of tack, which duly began to forge his reputation.

Eventually Caine moved to the Island, "where he was not slow to take full advantage of his fame and popularity". In 1901, he was elected to the House of Keys, the Manx Parliament. He subsequently returned to England for reasons related to the logistics of his literary projects. But he died on the Island, at his Greeba Castle home, having become "one of the best-read of British authors".

Muireann Maguire opens a very interesting essay with an anecdote about a reception given for Maxim Gorki in London in 1906. Present were guests he had specially requested, among them HG Wells, Bernard Shaw, Henry James, and Thomas Hardy. Gorki was reported to be disappointed, however, at the absence of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli...

We're surprised now. But from around 1890, Caine had achieved huge fame on both sides of the Atlantic. The Christian, published in 1897, was the first British novel to hit a million-plus print run, and Caine was described as the English Victor Hugo, or the English Tolstoy (we'll come back to that one in a minute). He was "mobbed on the streets of New York; and upon his death his family received condolences from King George V and the Prime Minister".


"... the river that runs through the glen called Ballaglass..."

Anyway, The Manxman...

Because of its Manx connections, I enjoyed it much more than The Eternal City, my only previous experience of his work. Yes, it's terribly Victorian (think rampant class consciousness, sick-beds, death-beds, fainting fits, suicide attempts, rakes, fallen women, and plenty of moralizing). And yes, the hero, Pete Quilliam, gives voice not only to noble thoughts and aspirations but also to opinions and attitudes beset with sexism and racism. And yes, you do wonder how the characters manage to get themselves into quite such a tangle (Victorian protagonists just seem to have an instinct for making the wrong move, often because they won't TALK to the relevant people at the appropriate time). And yes, he wildly overdoes the omens and auguries (SO many broken objects, coincidentally influential remarks, innocently symbolic actions, and spectral doppelganger visions...).

But it's undeniably a page-turner. The central triangle is an affecting one: Peter Quilliam, poor, uneducated, and illegitimate; Philip Christian, Pete's bright and upwardly mobile cousin and friend; and Katherine (Kate) Cregeen, the woman who is tragically loved by both of them.

Class is the dividing force. The conundrum is succinctly explained by the nasty Ross (Pete's legitimate half-brother). Girls like Katherine, he says, "can never marry the right man. The man who is worthy of her cannot marry her, and the man who marries her isn't worthy of her. It's like this, Philip. She's young, she's pretty, perhaps beautiful, has manners and taste, and some refinement. The man of her own class is clumsy and ignorant, and stupid and poor. She doesn't want him, and the man she does want -- the man she's fit for -- daren't marry her; it would be social suicide."

So, Pete loves Kate, and wants to marry her. Kate loves Pete too. But her father refuses, because he's poor and lacking in status. Pete heads for South Africa to make his fortune, and in the intervening years, Kate's affections transfer themselves to the man Pete has entrusted with her protection: Philip. Hearing that Pete has died, and fearing that her beloved Philip will choose his career rather than her, Kate -- what's the best word here? -- yields to, engineers, something of both? -- a passionate encounter with Philip in a lonely tholtan. But Pete isn't dead, of course. He returns, rich, and expecting to marry Kate. Philip isn't doing any knight-in-shining-armour, 'fess-all stuff (career, you see...), and almost in a fit of pique, Kate does marry Pete, but is carrying Philip's child... Racked by guilt, she eventually tells Philip about his paternity, and forsakes Pete and her child to live a clandestine and miserable existence in the house of the now-successful lawyer. Miserable that she is destroying yet another life, however, she takes off again. Pete eventually finds out all, and magnanimously eclipses himself to let Philip (who has decided to relinquish his honours in a fit of self-abnegation) and Kate (who, after a suicide attempt, joins him "at the climax of his shame and glory") start a new life together.

Phew...


"[Pete to Kitty] ... the nice little thing you were when we used to play fishermen together down at Cornaa Harbour -- d'ye remember?"



It's a maelstrom of plot elements, but there's much to admire. Caine's self-publicizing instincts notwithstanding, Maguire sees him as "genuinely troubled by humanitarian questions", among them child poverty and the plight of unmarried mothers, and both these themes are prominent in The Manxman.

He seems to genuinely have some understanding of the unfairness that underpins the lives of Victorian women. True, he sees nothing amiss with explaining female behaviour away with fits of the "vapours", or referring to the "natural inferiority of women". But he does appreciate the injustice of the unlevel nature of the playing field.

At one point, for example, Kate laments: "How I should like to fight my way in the world as you are doing! But a woman can do nothing to raise herself. Isn't it hard? Whatever the place where she was born in, she must remain there all her days. She can see her brothers rise, and her friends perhaps, but she must remain below. Isn't it a pity? It isn't that she wants to be rich or great. No, not that; only she doesn't want to be left behind by the people she likes. She must be, though, and just because she's a woman." Philip brushes this aside, replying that it is "always possible for a man to raise her". But he soon discovers -- to the detriment of both of them -- that this cross-class "raising" is easier talked about than implemented.

In another instance, speaking of Kate's "lapse" with Philip, he writes: "When a good woman falls from honour... it is mainly that she is a slave of ... the fallacy that by giving herself to the man she loves she attaches him to herself for ever... Alas! it is only the woman who clings the closer. The impulse of the man is to draw apart. He must conquer it or she is lost. Such is the old cruel difference and inequality of man and woman as nature made them -- the old trick, the old tragedy." Today, we're much more likely to ascribe such injustice to societal conditioning rather than "nature", but at least he recognizes there's a problem.


"Her voice came from the tholthan. 'Philip!'"



Caine also distances himself from the worst aspects of the religious practices he describes, and from the intolerant, divisive, and hypocritical misanthropes who propagate them. (Unsurprisingly, The Manxman came in for disapproval from several self-appointed guardians of morality.)


"Caesar visited Kate at Castle Rushen"

Also laudable are the descriptions of the nature and culture of the Island, which are very evocative. And his exposition of the ills to which it is subject -- too much governmental attention paid to "trippers", as opposed to fishers and farmers; over-fishing by non-Manx trawlers; too much emigration, brought on by material want -- is interesting. It's ironic in a way that Hall Caine did much to put the Island on the tourist map, and yet through Pete's voice, he outlines some of the problems inherent in that industry: "With the farming going to the dogs and the fishing going to the divil, d'ye know what the ould island's coming to? It's coming to an island of lodging-house keepers and hackney-car drivers. Not the Isle of Man at all, but the Isle of Manchester."

The Manxman, despite its tragic storyline, is also really funny in places. Sheltering from the storm in the public house, for example, Nancy Joe prays: "Thou knowest well I don't often bother Thee... It's twenty years and better since I asked anything of Thee before and if Thou wilt only take away this wind, I'll promise not to say another prayer for twenty years more." Similarly, when the wildly religious Caesar loses his livelihood, and quotes scripture in his anguished prayer -- "Save me, O God, for the waters are come in unto my soul, I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing" -- his long-suffering wife replies: "Aw no, Cæsar, we're on the road now. It's dry enough here, anyway."


"They crossed the bridge over the top of Ballaglass, which goes down to the mill at Cornaa"







Lots that's good, then. But comparisons with Tolstoy...?

Well, in their day, they were actually equally popular, although one reputation has clearly proved more lasting than the other. Caine also admired Tolstoy enormously, and craved his recognition, only to receive disdain (but then Tolstoy didn't rate Shakespeare either...). And thematically, while I'm not totally convinced by the idea of "anticipatory plagiarism", the parallels and connections highlighted by Maguire are very curious. The motif of the poor and abandoned young woman is common to many literary works, but two additional narrative tropes -- a man sitting in judgement over his erstwhile love in a court of law, and then deciding to redeem himself by rescuing her -- are interestingly shared by both Tolstoy (in Resurrection, 1899) and Caine (in The Manxman, 1894, which we have no evidence that Tolstoy read). Their respect for the other was one-sided, but both shared a desire to expose injustice: "Both Caine and Tolstoy blamed society, rather than individual women, for the degraded and occasionally criminal lives led by unmarried mothers and by prostitutes; and they both used their fiction, their media presence, and their status as household names to bring questions of gender injustice to the forefront of public debate." Both, consequently, provoked considerable controversy.

Perhaps this was part of the reason Caine's links with the Isle of Man, ironically, were ambiguous: "Although Caine was ever-keen to emphasise (and sometimes over-emphasise) his Manx credentials, his relationship with the Island was always strained. The hostile reaction that he often met from the Manx was partly due to his own elevated personality and also, importantly, due to his painting of Manx characters that included immoral drunkards and women capable of sleeping with a man without having married him. This encouraged the Manx to emphasise Caine’s English birth and the sometimes startling inaccuracies in his novels, despite living for 38 years at Greeba Castle and, most importantly, his genuine love of the Isle of Man."

It's true that the Manx don't tend to admire qualities that smack of grandstanding or attention-seeking (certainly my mother never rated Hall Caine, or encouraged me to read his work).

Then again, he was addressing a public perhaps not entirely familiar with novelistic conventions. Caine relates in his autobiography: "It was not at once, however, that our sober, class-leading island reconciled itself to the idea that these novels were fictions at all. I was constantly hearing them discussed as fact... After The Manxman a shrewd old friend of mine, living by the watertrough on Ballure, conceived the idea that he was the hero of that story; a photographer photographed him in that character, and now the good canny man does a comfortable business by selling souvenirs of himself as the only original Pete Quilliam, whom Kitty Cregeen was so heartless as to run away from."

So, all very interesting... Maybe I'll read a Hall Caine novel every time I go back...


"The day was wet and cheerless; a thick mist enshrouded the land, and going by Laxey they could just descry the top arc of the great wheel like a dun-coloured ghost of a rainbow in a grey sky"