This site is dedicated to the recovery of Andrew Lang’s writings, particularly Lang’s periodical writings. Although print-on-demand publishing, the publication of two editions of selections from Lang’s critical writings (and one of his selected children’s fiction), and the digitization of many Victorian periodicals have made Andrew Lang’s writing more accessible today than it has ever been since his death, the volume of Lang’s work and his occasionally shifting views can make him a difficult critic with whom to engage. It is hoped that this site will make Lang’s work more approachable for scholars and other interested readers.
Andrew Lang (31 March 1844–20 July 1912) was a polymath. Educated at the University of St Andrews, the University of Glasgow (for a year, in order to earn the Snell Exhibition to Balliol College), and in Oxford, he was a fellow at Merton College from 1868–1875, when he moved to London and took up journalism. (He married Leonora Blanche Alleyne at this time, but Merton had already rescinded the policy that fellows be unmarried.) Lang is best known today either for the twelve color fairy books that bear his name or for his periodical writings, though he was also a poet, a translator of Homer, a historian and biographer, a scholar with interests in myth and anthropology, and the author of various works of fiction including his serious fairy tale, The Gold of Fairnilee (1888); three fairy tales written in the tradition of Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring: (Prince Prigio [1899], Prince Ricardo [1893], and Tales of a Fairy Court [1907]); his “shilling dreadful,” The Mark of Cain (1886); The World’s Desire (1890), co-written with Rider Haggard, Parson Kelly (1899), a Jacobite novel co-written with A. E. W. Mason that has an interesting fictionalized portrayal of Lady Wortley Montagu; The Disentanglers (1902); and various parodies of popular works (perhaps the best of which is He, co-written with Walter Herries Pollock). Lang was also a Gifford Lecturer on Natural Theology, an important member of the Folklore Society (founded 1878) and president in 1888–1889 (Dorson 203), and the president of the Society for Psychical Research in 1911. He was an ardent defender of Romance, most notably in his “Realism and Romance” in the Contemporary Review (Nov. 1887) but also in many other articles and book prefaces. The Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews was founded in Lang’s honor; the most famous Andrew Lang Lecture was given by J.R.R. Tolkien on March 8, 1939 and revised into Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories.”
I would like to thank the National Science and Technology Council (previously the Ministry of Science and Technology) in Taiwan and the University of St Andrews Library Visiting Scholars Scheme for funding the archival visits necessary to recover Lang’s undigitized journalism in The Morning Post. NSTC/MOST has also funded other aspects of my Lang research (grant 104-2410-H-027-005).
This site is still in progress. Please check back to see later additions.
Go directly to the list of known periodicals to which Lang contributed. Many of these have clickable links where you can see essay titles and dates; some have links to digitized copies of the periodicals.
Featured Periodicals: Learn more about Lang’s contributions to The Author, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, The Contemporary Review, The Cornhill Magazine, the Daily News, Folk-Lore, The Fortnightly Review, Harper’s, the Illustrated London News, Longman’s Magazine, The Morning Post, and the Saturday Review.
Go directly to a list of Andrew Lang’s book publications.
See acknowledgements.
What’s new?
In 2023, I mainly made small updates to existing pages, including the bibliography page, and began to review what free scans to books and periodicals have been added in the past couple of years. For instance, I have now linked all of Lang’s articles in the Fortnightly Review.
In 2022, I added lists of Lang’s contributions to the Academy, the Athenaeum, Punch, and the Saturday Review that had been identified by the Curran Index as of Sep. 2022.
In 2021, I added the titles of Lang’s contributions to the Illustrated London News. I also changed the periodical drop-down menu so that periodicals with twenty or more Lang contributions appear in the list (with the exception of the Daily News, where most of Lang’s contributions remain unidentified). Naturally, there are many periodicals that are not far short of twenty contributions–and others for which all contributions have not yet been identified. I recommend looking at the full list, and please let me know if you are aware of a Lang-authored piece not listed.
In 2020, I added more of the Morning Post weekly column titles and summaries and updated the bibliography. I also added more Lang entries for specific periodical titles and linked full-text scans for others, including Lang’s contributions to the Magazine of Art.
This page was last updated on 27 Dec. 2023. This site was last edited on 29 Dec. 2023.
.
The Andrew Lang Site 