Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (41 page)

In July 1872 Mary married a young fellow of Brasenose College, (Thomas) Humphry Ward. Through her husband she acquired influential friends: ‘people who counted’, in her phrase. In 1873 she was instrumental in setting up the Lectures for Women Committee, which led to the establishment of Somerville College. The Wards had three children: Dorothy, Arnold (the great hope of the family) and Janet. Humphry Ward left academic life to take up a position on
The Times
, as their art critic, in 1881. The family then moved to London where Mary established herself as a literary hostess, in which capacity she became friendly with Henry James in 1882. A trip with James to the theatre led to her first published novel,
Miss Bretherton
(1884), the story of an actress’s tribulations and moral growth. It was well received, praised by the ‘Master’, but sold poorly. None the less she was encouraged to embark on a more ambitious work –
Robert Elsmere
.

After much revision (like George Eliot and
Romola
, the author could have said she entered the novel a young woman, and left it an old woman), Mrs Humphry Ward’s drama of religious faith, doubt, religious settlements in ‘darkest London’ and ‘Oxford’s agony’ was finally published in 1888. It was favourably reviewed by Gladstone (no less) and sold amazingly in Britain and – piratically – in the United States. On the strength of its sales, Mrs Ward secured a record-breaking £7,000 for the American rights of her third novel,
The History of David Grieve
(1892), a work which was held back until that country’s signing up to an international copyright agreement. Now rich, Ward bought a large country house, Stocks, in Aldbury in Hertfordshire. Despite alarming collapses in her health, she produced a series of bestselling novels over the next few years.
Marcella
(1894) was her first attempt at a literary heroine, a line continued with
Helbeck of Bannisdale
(1898), which contains a sensitive evocation of her early, fraught, relationship with her father (still
dickering between churches, and hopelessly estranged from his cancer-stricken wife).

Ward’s philanthropy was practically expressed in the establishment in 1897 of the Passmore Edwards Settlement (named after its principal donor) on the corner of Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury. ‘PES’, momentously, pioneered the children’s play movement in England. The founder’s good works are nowadays carried on by the ‘Mary Ward Centre’, in nearby Queen’s Square.

Ward’s output of bestsellers continued unabated, although poor health was taking a heavy toll. As the century turned, she could claim to be the second most famous Englishwoman of the Victorian era – she was the one without a crown. The year 1908 would be her pinnacle: in this year she made a triumphant tour of North America where she formed a friendship with her staunch admirer, President Theodore Roosevelt. He was placed in the trophy cabinet alongside Gladstone, her prime-ministerial admirer.

Thereafter, it was downhill. A main cause of distress was the spectacular life failure of her son, Arnold Ward. After a brilliant career at Eton and Oxford, he was elected Liberal Unionist MP for West Hertfordshire in 1910, a seat he held until 1918. But he failed to make any mark and ran up ruinous gambling debts which (ruinous, principally for her) his mother paid off. Her finances thereafter were precarious, not helped by her husband’s unlucky speculations in the art market. Catastrophically for her subsequent reputation, Ward consented to head the Women’s Anti-Suffrage Association in 1908. The anti-suffragette fiction which followed –
Daphne
(1909) and
Delia Blanchflower
(1915) – triggered a downturn in her popularity which has never been reversed and which accounts for the present oblivion in which her reputation lies. Members of her own family, friends, Somerville College (which she had helped found), and the bulk of those associated with the Passmore Edwards centre were opposed to her political views on women’s rights. Her campaigning, however, was indubitably successful in holding back reform until the war (more particularly the wartime need for female labour) made the franchise unstoppable in 1917.

During the years 1914–18, Mrs Ward’s authorial fortunes mended somewhat. At the request of Roosevelt, she wrote a work of propaganda for the American market,
England’s Effort
(1916), a book which is plausibly credited with helping to bring the United States into the First World War. The war novel
Missing
(1917) and the evocation of the Oxford of her girlhood,
Lady Connie
(1916), are the best fiction she produced in the last phase of her career. But tax demands and Arnold Ward’s incessant gaming losses led to Ward finding herself virtually bankrupt in 1919. It was small consolation that she was made a CBE in 1919. By now she was totally disabled by bronchitis, neuritis and heart disease. She died in London, and was buried
near Stocks at the church of St John the Baptist, Aldbury, Hertfordshire. Whatever religious ‘doubts’ she may have had no longer mattered.

Of all the bores and thick-headed idiots I ever knew, he took the palm.
Caine’s American publisher

Hall Caine wrote relatively few novels – under a dozen over a forty-year career which began in 1883. But he made a fortune out of lavish stage productions of his work, and, late in his life, film adaptations. Hall Caine was the only Victorian novelist to stalk through movie sets, giving horse’s-mouth advice to the players and director. Virtually the whole of the Isle of Man – whose Prospero he was – served as location sets for films of his books. Alfred Hitchcock’s last silent film,
The Manxman
(1929), was shot under the beady eye of the great author. The novel featured, as its proud author proclaimed, ‘the clash of passions as bracing as a black thunderstorm’. Hitch thought the narrative ‘banal’ and literary history has agreed with the movie man, not the Manxman.

Hall Caine is the avatar of Samuel Smilesism. No writer self-helped himself to a higher pitch of public eminence – not even Dickens. The poem that fired Caine’s juvenile literary ambition was ‘Kubla Khan’. He came across it, aged fifteen, in the ‘free’ Liverpool Public Library (that, he liked to say, was one of his ‘universities’; the other was the ‘London streets’). Caine himself would live his last decades in a pleasure dome of his own creating – Greeba Castle, on the Isle of Man, from whence he would sweep down, like royalty, in his yellow Rolls-Royce, as the local population gawped deferentially.

But there had been no limousines for the young Thomas Henry Caine. He was born on a flat-bed cart as his family rumbled along to Runcorn with all their household goods. His father was a displaced Manxman. A blacksmith by trade, John Caine had retrained as a shipwright, eventually settling in Liverpool, where Tom, the eldest child, was brought up. A bright boy, with a huge cranium, he was chronically nervous, and – at five foot on tiptoe – diminutive. In later life he insisted on being photographed seated, or standing on steps. His physique precluded following his
father into the shipyard: he could no more have done that than Bert Lawrence could have swung a pick alongside his father down the mines.

Tom Caine had one advantage as he started the great adventure of life: a fanatically devoted mother. Like Lawrence, it was his mother who nurtured his love of books, and it was Sarah Caine’s maiden name, ‘Hall’, that he would adopt, erasing the paternal ‘Tom’, in the years of his fame. The mark of ‘Caine’ he could not erase. He left school at fourteen, and went to work in an architect’s office, becoming a stalwart of working men’s self-help clubs. Powerful people liked him. A formative event was his early friendship with Henry Irving and the great actor’s factotum, Bram Stoker, who would later dedicate
Dracula
to him (one of the few occasions readers nowadays come across Caine’s name). From Irving’s grandiose theatrics, he derived a sense of melodramatic grandeur along with a super-heated reverence for Shakespeare. His later, ‘great’ work was composed at a desk under a bust of the bard. It was one of Caine’s foibles to look like the Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare. The bald pate was supplied by nature, early in life. On one occasion, an ocean liner barber carelessly overtrimmed the Bardic beard. Caine skulked in his cabin for days, until regrowth made it possible for him to again face the world as Shakespeare redux.

Even more formative than the Irving and Stoker connection was his relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It began with a highly intelligent fan letter in 1879 when Rossetti was in the last years of a spectacularly dissipated life. He was lonely, suffused with guilt over the suicide of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, and sodden with drugs. Caine was taken into the house as the poet-painter’s personal assistant, the previous holder of the post having left in a huff over salary. One of his (unwilling) duties was to administer doses of chloral that would have killed less addicted employers. Caine did his work loyally over the last two years of Rossetti’s wretched life.

His career in fiction began with the dark Cumbrian tale,
The Shadow of a Crime
(1885). Set in the post-Civil War period, and larded with a dialect which sounds as if it were devised by Professor Stanley Unwin (e.g. ‘I’ll toitle him into the beck until he’s as wankle as a wet sack’), it reaches its peak in a ‘tremendous’ episode: the ‘peine forte et dure’ for the hero who, for excessively noble reasons, refuses to plead in a case of murder and must, himself, be judicially murdered. One can picture Caine’s successive million sellers as a forever expanding blimp, which never quite burst:
A Son of Hagar
(1886),
The Deemster
(1887),
The Bondman
(1890),
The Scapegoat
(1891),
The Manxman
(1894),
The Christian
(1897). The Caineman marched on, inexorably, through ever more grandiose scenery. The culminating point was
The Eternal City
(1901), set in Rome. It climaxes, after some superheated melodrama,
with a vision of 1950 and a utopian republic whose charter is the Lord’s Prayer. As one curmudgeonly reviewer put it, ‘to enter Mr Caine’s city is rather like plunging into a vast cauldron of primitive hotch potch’.

Beneath the gigantic papier mâché constructions of his fiction lies one radioactive biographical fact. The story begins in 1882, shortly after Rossetti’s death. Caine was living in digs in Clement’s Inn, London, with a pal, Eric Robertson, who was studying for the law. He was at a loose end. As his biographer records:

In the evenings the young men had a meal sent in from a coffee shop … The food was brought by two girls who worked there, one of them called Mary Chandler … The bomb fell one evening in September [1882]. Instead of the girls with their meal the two fathers, or in the case of Mary Chandler the stepfather arrived. Their daughters, they claimed, had been ruined. When did the young gentlemen intend to make honest women of them? … Mary Chandler [b. May 1869] was just 13.

According to Caine’s biographer, nothing more than ‘a bit of flirting’ had taken place. And even if more had, the age of consent for girls – until 1885 – was thirteen. Humbert Humbert’s heaven. None the less, Caine accepted responsibility. Mary was dispatched to Sevenoaks to be educated. She conceived their first child in August 1883 at just fourteen. Caine registered the child as ‘Ralph Hall’, lying about his and Mary’s ages. He eventually married her, in 1886, in Scotland – again lying about key details on the certificate. They had a second, legitimate child and remained married for the rest of their lives.

Curtains such as that shrouding the private life of Hall Caine rarely part, and then only for the briefest of glimpses. But the rule is, we should always assume there is more, buried in the underlay of fiction, than will ever meet the biographical eye – however piercing.

By Suffering made Strong.

Grand was born Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke in Northern Ireland. Both parents were English by birth, her father being a Royal Navy lieutenant assigned to
coastguard duties in the province. She gives a sharply observed picture of her childhood, and its shabby gentility, in the Castletownrock chapters of her novel,
The Beth Book
. In 1861, on the death of her father (who, if the novel is to be believed, was grossly unfaithful to his wife), the remaining family returned to Scarborough, in England. Sarah attended boarding schools, unhappily, and emerged much less well educated than her two brothers. However, this was to be expected – she was a girl.

A nubile girl, as it happened. Aged just sixteen, she was married to Lt-Colonel David McFall. Her husband was twenty-three years her senior, an army surgeon, and a widower with children. The marriage was not a happy one, as Frances was dragged in her husband’s train to various postings across the Empire. There was one child, David, born in 1871 – conceived, as the birth date confirms, very early in the union. Thereafter one assumes contraception or a sexually blank relationship. McFall’s tyrannous character and the misogynistic branch of medicine he practised in a Lock hospital, for the forcible treatment of incarcerated prostitutes, are portrayed in the character of the wholly hateful McClure in
The Beth Book
. Dan McClure is also a sadistic vivisectionist (as was McFall, one is led to assume), when not forcibly treating women for diseases given to them by men.