Hall Caine became the secretary, factotum and nurse to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the last years of the great poet's life.
Caine had come to be very impressed by the poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and he gave a series of three lectures on the poems of Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelites. He sent a copy of one of his published lectures to Rossetti, who by that time had become a virtual recluse and was "ravaged by years of addiction to chloral and too much whisky". A frequent correspondence followed and they eventually met in September 1880 when Caine visited Rossetti in his home at Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where he lived "in shabby splendour". The following year Caine left his employment in Liverpool and went to live with Rossetti and stayed there until Rossetti's death in April 1882. During that time he was "secretary, companion, housekeeper, general factotum and eventually nurse" to Rossetti. Caine had negotiated for Rossetti's painting Dante's Dream of the Death of Beatrice to be hung in Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery and he represented the painter at its installation in November 1881. In January 1882 Caine's anthology Sonnets of Three Centuries was published.