SOURCE: “Sir Hall Caine and the Greatest Public,” in The London Mercury, Vol. XIV, No. 80, June, 1926, pp. 156-69.

In the following essay, Shand discusses the defining characteristics of Caine's fiction.

It is often one of the most baffling tasks for criticism to discover wherein lies the wider appeal of a book, and especially of those modern novels which, though they sell in hundreds of thousands, are usually considered rank outlaws from the province of fine literature. The problem, if not altogether new, is as recent as the coming of age of that vast body of potential readers enfranchised by the passing of the Education Acts. There have been many “popular” writers of English fiction in the past, from Richardson to Lord Lytton and Mrs. Aphra Behn to Mrs. Henry Wood, but the first English novelist to win a public on what may, perhaps, be called the grand scale...