On Monday, 4 February, 1901, a brief note appears in the last column of p. 2, (sandwiched between “Arrival from the Cape” and “The Children’s Aid Society”) stating, “Mr. Andrew Lang will be a regular contributor to the Morning Post in future.” Initially, the appearance of the column was irregular, though Saturday was the most popular day for its appearance. By 1905 (and until after his death in July 1912), Lang’s column began appearing regularly on Fridays, in addition to Lang’s many signed book reviews for the paper.
The tabulation below of Lang’s Morning Post columns is currently incomplete, and not all scans of his work are available. In 2016, I traveled to the Bodleian Library to make scans of Andrew Lang’s Morning Post columns, which were not then digitally available. Since 2016, however, the British Newspaper Archive has digitized The Morning Post up until 1909, and BNA subscribers may download files from the BNA for private research. I have used their site to add many column titles from 1901–1905, following the column titles thus found with (BNA). While I cannot post BNA columns publicly, individual subscribers to the British Newspaper Archive are welcome to download them for their personal research. Researchers may also be interested to trace how Andrew Lang’s work is reviewed or advertised in the paper: I have not highlighted those articles here.
Scanning The Morning Post from 1910–1912 is currently low on the British Newspaper Archive’s priority list (per e-mail communications), but it may be worthwhile for you to check their archive for updates or to make a request that further Morning Post scanning be prioritized.
Researchers should note that columns probably exist that are not in the list below, particularly for 1901–1904, when Lang’s work appeared irregularly in the paper. Optical character recognition technology (OCR) is far from perfect, and with Lang’s writing appearing on different days of the week and on different pages of the paper, it would be extremely difficult to find every article.
- Article titles followed by (BNA) have been identified using the British Newspaper Archive and can be downloaded by individual subscribers to that database but cannot be posted publicly.
- Articles with BAL written after them were found in the Book of Andrew Lang, a scrapbook of Lang articles, unfortunately without page numbers, at the Special Collections at the University of St Andrews.]
- Linked titles below lead you to readable, low-resolution scans of Lang’s columns on these pages, which I scanned myself. I am grateful to both the Bodleian and the British Library for their permission to post these scans here. When you open the PDF, the initial page is often a full-page scan, followed by three pages in which Andrew Lang’s column appears by itself.)
Morning Post columns by year:
- 1901 Morning Post columns
- 1902 Morning Post columns
- 1903 Morning Post columns
- 1904 Morning Post columns
- 1905 Morning Post columns (partial)
- 1906 Morning Post columns
- 1907 Morning Post columns
- 1908 Morning Post columns
- 1909 Morning Post columns (partial)
- 1910 Morning Post columns (not yet recovered)
- 1911 Morning Post columns (not yet recovered)
- 1912 Morning Post columns (columns from May–August recovered)
The Andrew Lang Site 