The Daily News (1846–1912) was one of the periodicals to which Lang contributed most regularly—perhaps the most regularly—but because his contributions there were all anonymous, very little research has been done on Lang and this paper. As of fall 2017, the title was not digitized in the British Newspaper Archive, and, whether available digitally or only through microfilm, with no byline, combing through such media in order to search for Andrew Lang articles would be eye-straining. I would welcome suggestions and advice on how to recover Lang’s Daily News journalism.
Some of his contributions were collected into Lost Leaders (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1889). More information about the Daily News and Pett Ridge’s selection of these leaders is available in Roger Lancelyn Green’s biography, pp. 56–57. Green quotes Pett Ridge as saying ‘The newspaper office did not wish its file to be inspected, because the sum paid to each contributor was entered there, and I went day after day, in my luncheon hour, to the British Museum, and made a selection” (57). Pett Ridge had the advantage of being able to ask Lang whether the articles he had identified were actually Lang’s; and he found he misidentified two (57). I have not been able to determine whether any of the paper’s related files survive to the present day; my initial archive searches were unsuccessful (though there are interesting archival holdings on the Daily News and Harriet Martineau , the Charles Masterman Papers, and the General Strike). Please let me know if you know more through the contact page.
A few other Daily News articles have been collected in the envelopes of newspaper clippings available at the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Still others can be identified from Andrew Lang’s letters. In Friends Over the Ocean (Rijksuniversiteit Gent, 1989), for instance, Marysa Demoor identifies several Daily News articles in the footnotes to Andrew Lang’s letters to James Brander Matthews.
Sources consulted
“Daily News.” Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Ed. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor. Gent: Academia Press, 2009. 158.
Demoor, Marysa. Friends over the Ocean: Andrew Lang’s American Correspondents 1881–1912 [Letters to J. B. Matthews, H. H. Furness, F. J. Child, William James, and J. R. Lowell]. Gent: Rijksuniversiteit Gent, 1989.
Green, Roger Lancelyn. Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography. Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1946.
Return to the list of known periodicals to which Lang contributed.
The Andrew Lang Site 