The St. James’s Gazette, a London evening newspaper that frequently published articles and stories by well-known Victorian writers, was published from 1880–1905.
The Lang articles listed below were found using Roger Lancelyn Green’s Andrew Lang and B. Meredith Langstaff’s list of articles from the St. James’s Gazette, as well as spot-check searches in the British Newspaper Archive. (Langstaff lists the date but usually does not list the title.) A thorough search of the British Newspaper Archive may uncover more work by Lang. However, such a search is difficult because Lang’s name comes up extremely frequently in searches: the St. James’s Gazette published advertisements for many books and periodicals to which Lang was a contributor, summaries of the contents of recent periodicals, and reviews of works by both Andrew and Mrs. [Leonara] Lang. These facts, combined with imperfect OCR technology, makes a definitive list of Lang’s contributions difficult to determine, though the numbers of Lang’s “Letters to Eminent Authors” clearly indicate that many letters are missing from the list below.
In Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody, Lang also notes that his letters from one fictional character to another first appeared in the St. James’s Gazette.
24 Aug. 1881. (BML–At the date this page was published, The British Newspaper Archive only included The James’s Gazette from 1882 onward.)
“Letters to Eminent Authors II: To Herodotus.” 1 Aug. 1885, pp. 5–6. (Coming to the city of the Ford of Ox. Signed Andrew Lang.)
“Letters to Eminent Authors–XV: Epistle to Mr. Alexander Pope” [In Iambic couplets.] 31 Oct. 1885. pp. 5–6. Signed. (BML/BNA)
6 June 1887. (BML lists this date, but I was unable to locate the article in a BNA search. It is possible that Langstaff had access to a list of anonymous articles by Lang?)
13 July 1887. (BML: I was unable to locate the article in a BNA search.)
“Ballad Forgeries.” 2 Mar. 1888. (RLG 255, BML: Both Green and Langstaff attribute this anonymous article to Lang.)
17 Sep. 1888. (BML: I was unable to find a signed contribution in a quick spot check. Page 14 has a short paragraph summarizing Lang’s “Literary Anodynes” in the Princeton Review.)
“Writers of Today and Yesterday: Jules Lemaitre.” 12 Oct. 1888. pp. 3–4. Signed. (RLG, BML, BNA.)
“Romance and the Reverse.” 7 Nov. 1888. pp. 3–4. Signed. (RLG, BNA)
“Mr. Buchanan’s Young Man.” 10 Apr. 1889. pp. 3–4. Signed. (RLG, BML, BNA)
“Mr. Robert Buchanan on Natural Religion.” 10 May. 1889, p. 5. [BNA, Lang quotes from Buchanan’s article in the Universal Review and objects to Buchanan’s characterizations of an unnamed recent lecture (Lang lists the possibilities as the Gifford lectures at St Andrews; Book collecting in Edinburgh, and Religion and Progress in Dundee): “Nowhere, certainly did I proclaim the discovery ‘that there is no God.’ It is distasteful to any man to speak of his belief in such a trivial connection as this: I shall merely remark that Mr. Buchanan does me injustice. I am not what he supposes. . . . Nowadays it does a man no harm to be called an atheist; and he may even get over being introduced to an audience by a Scotch peer [Buchanan claims Lang was], and being reported to deduce religion from the anxieties of a monkey in the ravages of an electric tempest. But Mr. Buchanan has been misled in some way, by the lack of intelligence or of memory in some reporter. It is of no consequence to me, and I will confess to the peer if he can be proved against me. To the other charges I cannot confess.”]
[The St. James’s Gazette for 26 Aug. 1889 (p. 7) has the article “Mr. Andrew Lang as a Journalist.” “Mr. Lang’s position as a journalist is unique (the Scots Observer says). For many years he has been a constant contributor to journals and magazines. There are one or two which you cannot open without a thrill of expectation that they may hold a ‘Lang.’ Yet he has never written of what was uppermost in the public mind; he has always preferred to babble pleasantly of what was engrossing his own: of book-hunting, perhaps, or cricket, or golf, or Thackeray, or fishing. But whatever he chooses to discuss–of this you may be certain–that he rarely covers a column with a reference to the Homeric hero or the friendly Bushman. The King Charles’s Heads which he keeps on his premises are as numerous as the skulls of the head-hunter of the Solomon Islands. He cannot speak of Plotinus without a side-glance at the Zulus, or discourse concerning Agamemnon’s bones without reminding you of T’chacka or Pānda. His articles on sport, if they lack gusto (and they do), are touched with a skill unknown before. The literature of cricket–displaying style and form as well as knowledge–may be said to be his invention. [More on golf and Lang’s methods of attack.] “On occasion he can be the sternest of critics. Vulgarity and pretentiousness of style never escape his scorn. But his weapons of attack are ever of the lightest. He knows not the scalping-knife, and the bludgeon is too heavy for his hand. Has he not been called the Ghost of Lucian? . . . yet the description is hardly fair. Lucian laughed to scorn theology and morals. Mr. Lang reserves his sarcasms for “le dernier de M. W. de Howells’ or some brand-new poseur in style from wild America. But he always lays on the lash with such reckless and such unexpected humour, the victim choose but pass to resentment through laughter. . . . It may be said of him, as of scarce another living writer, that his journalism is nearly always literature. . . . His pen glides over the paper with an insolence of ease. The neatness with which his articles are compacted is astonishing. He has not a rival in the saying of risky things with an appearance of innocence. He touches a colloquialism, and behold! it has acquired a certain elegance.”]
“Literature as a Trade.” 22 Oct. 1890. p. 5. (RLG, BML, BNA)
“An Unsolved Mystery” [John Sobieski Stuart]. Letter to the Editor. 5 Feb. 1892. p. 4. Signed. (RLG, BML)
21 July 1892. (BML lists this date, but I was unable to locate the article in a BNA search.)
11 Aug. 1892. (BML lists this date, but I was unable to locate the article in a BNA search.)
“Appreciations of Tennyson.” 7 Oct. 1892. p. 5. (RLG, BNA). Lang writes the first appreciation of Tennyson, on p. 5, and Edmund Gosse writes the second, on page 6.)
“A Yarn of the Black Hand.” 6 Jan. 1894. (RLG, BML)
“The Contemplative Gentleman’s Recreation.” [John Beaumont.] 21 Feb. 1894. p. 7. (RLG, BML, BNA)
“Mark Twain’s ‘Joan of Arc.'” 18 Mar. 1896. p. 4. (BNA)
This page was last edited on 7 Sep. 2020.
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