Hall Caine Biography

BOOK REVIEWS shaving mirror and cannot see the reflection of Dracula, who is standing behind him, owes more to conventional vampire lore (which Stoker extensively researched) than to what Senf describes as Stoker's conscious intention to critique the polarities of nineteenth-century racial attitudes by showing the reader that Harker and Dracula resemble each other. Here as elsewhere, the discussion blurs the distinction between meanings available to Stoker's contemporaries and those available to a relativistic twentieth-century reader primed to deconstruct the superficial coherences of the story he offers. Similarly blurred are differences between claiming that the novel embodies ideological contradictions that destabilize conventional categories—which is certainly true of Dracula and, one might argue, true of most novels, insofar as they inevitably attempt to present ideology as being transparent and consistent in ways that it can never be—and implying that Stoker somehow intended this destabilization, or that his views are simply hard to reconcile because he lived in a transitional time, when people were caught between traditional and modern ideas. It is important for student readers, the main target audience for this series, to appreciate the links between texts and the historical periods that produce them. Senfs thorough survey of contextual issues does an important service in this regard, even if the theoretical relationships between author, text, and context could profit from more consistent analysis . Ultimately, though, what keeps readers coming back to Dracula is not its relevance for contemporaries, but its relentless suspense, its eerie otherness, its uncanny grip on our unconscious fears—effects that cannot be captured by the tame compromises between progress and tradition into which this study repeatedly dissolves the novel's mysteries. Rosemary Jann __________________ George Mason University Hall Caine Biography Vivien Allen. Hall Caine: Portrait of a Romancer. Sheffield: Academic Press, 1997. 449 pp. Cloth £37.50 $55.00 Paper £16.95 $24.95 AS VIVIEN ALLEN asserts in the preface to her biography of Thomas Hall Caine (1853-1931), "Mention Hall Caine now and the likely response is 'Hall who?' Yet, in his day he was so famous he was recognised on the streets of London and New York. . . . Like some other popular writers of his time he was accorded the adulation reserved now for pop stars or footballers___He was more widely read than most other 325 ELT 42 : 3 1999 novelists of his time and was frequently the subject of caricatures [in Vanity Fair and Punch]. . . ." In fact, by the time of his death in 1931, 10,000,000 copies of his novels had been sold and some of his literary productions had been in print for three decades and translated in several foreign languages. Having obtained access to Hall Caine's (HC) long restricted voluminous archive in the Manx Museum (Isle of Man) and researched every known collection of HC correspondence in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States, Allen provides a very perceptive portrait of HC (far superior to C. F. Kenyon's authorized biography, Hall Caine: The Man and the Novelist, 1891). It is an extremely interesting story of a life which began as the son of a ship's smith in Liverpool. His early childhood was spent with relatives on the Isle of Man. At fourteen, HC left school to work as an architect's apprentice, but soon left the architect to succeed an uncle as a teacher in a primary school on the Isle of Man. However this didn't last long and he returned to Liverpool where he was employed as a builder's assistant. Meanwhile he began to write essays on architecture for such trade journals as the Building News (which were praised by John Ruskin) and, as a member of a local literary society, cultivated friendships with such writers as T. E. Brown and William Watson, the actor Henry Irving and his manager, Bram Stoker. Above all, HC greatly admired (and tried to emulate) the verse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Following the publication of his lecture on Rossetti 's poetry in 1879, which greatly pleased Rossetti, HC established a close friendship with the poet. Allen notes that HCs association with Rossetti was "The single most important thing in his...