Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  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.

  FN

  Mary Augusta Ward (née Arnold)

  MRT

  Robert Elsmere

  Biog

  J. Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward (1990)

  77. Hall Caine 1853–1931

  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.

  FN

  (Sir) Thomas Henry Hall Caine

  MRT

  The Manxman

  Biog

  V. Allen, Hall Caine: Portrait of a Victorian Romancer (1997)

  78. Sarah Grand 1854–1943

  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 childhoo
d, 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.

  Grand began writing the stridently polemical novel Ideala: A Study from Life in 1880, although the work was not published until eight years later, at her own expense. The small profits from this first novel allowed her to leave her husband, whom she evidently loathed, in 1890, and decamp with her young son to London, where she supported herself by writing. The author had by now changed her name to ‘Sarah Grand’ so that she could write more freely than she could as ‘McFall’. The marital owner of that name, none the less, must have writhed if he ever read her fiction.

  Her reputation was made by the scandalous The Heavenly Twins (1893). One publisher who was shown the manuscript turned it down because of the syphilis theme (the unlucky heroine, thanks to a venereally rotten husband, delivers a baby which resembles ‘a speckled toad’). Another publisher, under the advice of George Meredith, turned it down as ‘too clogged with ideas’. Ironic, since Meredith himself wrote novels famously clogged with verbiage. When it was eventually published, under the imprint of the Guardian newspaper office, very unusually, The Heavenly Twins sold 20,000 copies and was reprinted six times in its first year. It made its author close on £20,000. Meredith should have been so lucky.

  Four of Grand’s polemical ‘New Woman’ novels: Ideala (1888), A Domestic Experiment (1891), The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897) are influential feminist works to this day. She is credited with inventing the term ‘New Woman’. Opponents like Mrs Lynn Linton called them ‘the shrieking sisterhood’ but Grand’s heroines do not merely shriek. They find employment, flee the shackles of marriage, believe in ‘rational’ dress (no crinolines, bustles or corsets), commit guiltless adultery, or live defiantly, in sin, or with lesbian partners. In a fighting preface to Ideala, Grand defended her combativeness with the assertion: ‘Doctors spiritual must face the horrors of the dissecting room.’ She believed that men – not women – with VD should be imprisoned and injected with arsenic, the sovereign pre-antibiotic treatment. Open discussion about venereal infection, and the protection of women from it, was her lifelong campaign.

  Grand in fact lived a very long life but wrote (or chose to publish) relatively little, although she lectured widely on progressive topics dear to her. After her husband’s death in 1898, she lived in Tunbridge Wells where she was President of the local branch of the Suffragette Societies. In 1920 she moved to Bath, where she lived with a woman friend, and was subsequently mayoress of the city on six occasions. Born during the Crimean War, she lived long enough to have her house destroyed by a German bomb, during the Blitz. In Who’s Who, Grand slyly entered her principal recreation as ‘sociology’. ‘Venereology’ would, presumably, not have been printable.

  FN

  Sarah Grand (Frances Elizabeth Bellenden McFall; née Clarke)

  MRT

  The Beth Book

  Biog

  A. Heilmann, New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird (2004)

  79. Marie Corelli 1855–1924

  I never married because I have three pets at home that answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog that growls every morning, a parrot that swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night. Corelli’s spinster credo

  Corelli’s is the most spectacular of posthumous nose-dives. Until her death in 1924, she held her place as Britain’s best known and most notorious bestselling novelist. Works like Barabbas (1893) – with its feisty heroine Judith Iscariot (does the stupid woman think ‘Iscariot’ is a surname, like ‘Fotheringay’? asked reviewers) – clocked up cumulative sales of over a quarter of a million at unprecedented speed. Hot cakes didn’t come into it. At her zenith in the late 1890s, publishers were elbowing each other out of the way to offer Corelli advances of £10,000 per book. Sixteen years after her death, her annual royalty cheques amounted to £28.

  Marie Corelli’s fiction extends to her name (‘Madonna of the little heart’) and the pedigree behind it. She was born plain Mary Mills, in Bayswater, London, the bastard daughter of Charles Mackay, third-rate novelist and second-rate journalist. Her mother was a servant girl, Mary Ellen Mills. Unrated. Six years after Mary’s birth, Mackay made an honest woman of her mother. ‘Minnie Mackay’, as she was now called (although still by law illegitimate), was ill educated but fearsomely bright. In 1876, her mother died and Bertha Vyver, a childhood friend, joined the Mackay household. Initially a companion, she became Mary’s closest friend, and probably her lover. With Vyver’s help (she was the daughter of a countess) Minnie devised more exciting names than those her background had bequeathed her – with a view to a career in music. Programmes listed ‘Rose Trevor’ and the more exotic ‘Marie di Corelli’. It was a metamorphosis: from below-stairs bastard to concert-hall butterfly.

  Music, alas, proved too hard, and in the mid-1880s, she turned to fiction. In 1886, George Bentley, against the advice of his reader, Hall Caine (who, even at this early stage, may have sniffed a dangerous rival), published A Romance of Two Worlds. Marie was thirty-one, and resolutely claimed to be seventeen: no beauty, she hated being photographed, insisting that the public should have an idealised picture of her. The camera was altogether too unidealistic a device. Her first novel was inspired, Corelli mysteriously claimed, by a ‘peculiar psychic occurrence’ and was designed to expound ‘the gospel of electricity’. That too was somewhat mysterious. Christianity, evidently, had lost its voltage. A Romance of Two Worlds, like everything Marie went on to write, was a runaway bestseller, and was devoured by all classes of reader. By mid-career she had even recruited Queen Victoria as a fan. For Gladstone, she was a writer in the Martin Tupper class, if less godly – Christian godly – than his particular favourite, Mrs Humphry Ward. The Prince of Wales was an admirer of the spiffing little authoress and Marie returned the compliment by introducing ‘HRH’ into her fiction more frequently than was strictly tasteful.

  Professionally, the move from George Bentley to Methuen with Barabbas: A Dream of the World’s Tragedy in 1893 was momentous. It was the bestselling of all her bestsellers. Together with Hall Caine’s The Manxman and Mrs Humphry Ward’s Marcella, Methuen’s 6s single-volume Corelli titles did for the venerable three-decker, opening a new era in the history of British fiction, in which buyer not borrower was king and Miss Corelli his queen.

  Posterity has had great fun with Corelli’s absurdities: the ‘corrected photographs’; the gondola complete with Venetian gondolier in which she would glide down the Avon to the amazement of her fellow Stratfordians; the platform in her living room at Mason Croft – Shakespeare’s house, of course – on which (four-foot-nothing in her silk stockings) she would perch to receive visitors. The liver, almost fatally bisected by the corsets needed to preserve a wasp-waist in middle age. The conviction for food hoarding (i.e. sugar to make jam) during the First World War – the prosecution brought by nei
ghbours who hated her and that damned gondola.

  But Marie, too, was a good hater. Whether like her creation, Mavis Clare, she trained her dogs to raven the invariably slashing notices of her novels is not clear. After The Sorrows of Satan (1895), her books carried an instruction on their fly-leaves that no review copies would be sent out. If the hacks wanted her novels, the swine could buy them full-price from the bookshop like everyone else. The reviewers kept slashing and the novels kept selling by the hundred thousand. She loathed the ‘New Woman’ (‘tomboy tennis-players and giantesses’) and nurtured messianic delusions, buoyed up by her phenomenal success. In The Master Christian (1900), availing herself of the millenarian moment, Corelli addressed all the churches of the world ‘in the name of Christ’ and instructed them on how to put their holy houses in order. Alas, the £28 royalty cheque and oblivion were just over the horizon.

  FN

  Marie Corelli (Mary Mackay)

  MRT

  The Sorrows of Satan

  Biog

  E. Bigland, Marie Corelli: The Woman and the Legend (1953)

  80. Lady Florence Dixie 1855–1905