THE REWARDS OF AUTHORSHIP.

Otago Witness, Issue 4048, 13 October 1931, Page 64

THE REWARDS OF AUTHORSHIP.

SIR HALL CAINE’S RECORD ESTATE. If the cabled estimate is correct, and if it be assumed that his fortune was amassed entirely out of literary earnings. Sir Hall Caine, who is said to have left £250,000, was able to put aside more money than any previous novelist. This is the more surprising since Sir Hall Caine’s works attained their greatest popularity at a time when literary earnings were smaller than they 7 are to-day and the American market was not as fully developed. Arnold Bennett, who received £5OOO a year for his weekly causerie about books in the Evening Standard alone, and might be counted one of the most successful of authors in this century 7 , left an estate valued at £40,551, which is not large; but Bennett was a man of expensive tastes and a very generous spender Thomas Hardy left over £90,000 when he died in 1918, a record to that time, and the public was surprised; even greater astonishment was caused shortly 7 after when Stanley Weyman’s estate was proved at over £lOO,OOO. Charles Dickens, who added to his literary earnings by his public readings, left under £BO,OOO, and Anthony Trollope left £70,000. The following table gives the value of the estates

left by some well-known authors who have died within the past 30 years:— Charles Garvice ~ £71,049 Miss Braddon (Mrs M. E. Maxwell) 68,112 Conan Doyle 63,491 Frank Danby (Mrs Julia Frankau 34,068 Florence Barclay 33,000 George Meredith 32,000 Edna Lyall 25,338 W. J. Locke 24,505 John - Oliver Hobbes (Mrs Craigie) 24,502 Marie C0re11i24,076 Joseph Conrad .. 20,045 Manville Fenn 11,849 Mrs Humphrey Ward .. .. 11,308 Rosa N. Carey .. 10,991 Edwin Arnold 6,417 Alfred Austin (Poet Laureate) 2,008 George Gissing 1,053