I
delivered a lecture before the Jewish Workmen's Club in the East End,
in a hall crammed to suffocation. I shall never forget the enthusiasm
of the audience, the tears, the laughter, the applause, the wild
embraces to which I was subjected."

This was the only use that Hall Caine ever made of all his experiences
of his tour in Russia in 1892, which had lasted many months, for when
he returned to Cumberland to write the story which was to be called
"The Jew," he found the task impossible. "I worked very hard at it, I
turned it over in every direction in my mind, but I felt I could not
do it. I wanted the experience of a life; I could not enter into
competition in their own field with the great Russian novelists. I
found it could not be done."

THE WRITING OF "THE MANXMAN."

In the meanwhile, circumstances had obliged him to give up Castlerigg
Cottage in disgust, and he accordingly removed to the Isle of Man,
with the determination of fixing his residence there definitely. For
the first six months he lived at Greeba Castle, a very pretty but very
lonely house, about half-way between Peel and Douglas, on the Douglas
road--and it was there that most of "The Manxman" was written.

"I turned my Jewish story into a Manx story, and 'The Jew' became 'The
Manxman.' In my original scheme, Philip was to be a Christian,
governor of his province in Russia; Pete, Cregeen, and Kate were to be
Jews. I thought that the racial difference between the two rivals
would afford greater dramatic contrast than the class difference, and
it was only reluctantly that I altered the scheme of my story."

Hall Caine, in speaking of the genesis of "The Manxman," may be
induced to show his little pocket-diary for 1893. Against each day
during the whole of January and part of February are written the
words: "The Jew."

"That means," he will explain, "that all those days I was working at
my story in my head."

"The Manxman" was finished at the house in Marine Parade in Peel where
Hall Caine is now temporarily residing--a large brick house, which was
built for a boarding-house and is certainly not the house for an
artist. As he has determined to make his home in the island, he is at
present hesitating whether to purchase Greeba Castle, or to build
himself a house on the Creg Malin headland at Peel, than which no more
wondrous site for a poet's home could be found in the Queen's
dominions, overlooking the bay, with the rugged pile of Peel Castle