FINANCE OF LITERARY SHRINES.

Northland Age, Volume IV, Issue 48, 20 July 1908, Page 8

FINANCE OF LITERARY SHRINES.

A writer in “Munsey’s Magazine” brings forward some interesting calculations regarding the “Finance of Literary Shrines.” Stratfortf-on-Avon is first coirsidered. Here Shakespeare’s birthplace, the museum the Memorial Theatre, and the tomb are to be seen only on payment of sixpence in each instance. Last year more than forty thousand person^ . visited Stratford. In sixpenny fees I alone some four thousand pounds must have been raised, and this takes no account of railway and hotel expenditure either at Ordinary times or during the annual festival. To see Abbotsford more than twenty thousand people paid their shillings last year, very many of them being visitors from London. The Burns country in and around Ayr had nearly sixty thousand visitors last year, and most of them paid threepence to inspect the monument on the Boon, the fee to enter the cottage, and the tip to some one or other at “Holloway’s auld haunted kirk."

Dove Cottage, Grasmere, with its memories of Wordsworth, is another literary shrine where sixpences tinkle by the thousand ; and the long statistic, were they completed, would include the silver harvests at Carl.le's house at Chelsea; Haworth ; Elstow ; and the “Lorna Doone”